Fun fact: in China, they only recognize 6 continents. As far as they’re concerned, Australia is a VERY large island off of Asia.
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To someone from JAPAN, though??
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No joke. I’ve spent many hours sitting in the middle of the Eisenhower. If there’s construction, and there usually is, it can be several hours just to get from Chicago to Joliet.
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Japan is about the same size as Montana (the fourth largest state, slightly smaller than California). It only looks like a tiny island on maps.
It’s multiple islands, and East to West not that wide anywhere. Only if you’re driving North-South on Honshu do you have the possibility of going more than a few hundred miles before hitting the ocean. You’d know you’d messed up a LOT sooner there!
Driving North-South and covering a couple hundred miles is still a possibility.
Or maybe he wound up in Ohio because there wasn’t any ocean there to stop him. Like, he reached Put In Bay and decided it was time to turn around 
Imagine if he took the I-57 Meth Superhighway instead. There’s nothing there. He would have reached New Orleans before he realized something was wrong.
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To be fair, if he drove from Chinatown in Chicago to Ohio by way of Indiana, he was on a Meth Superhighway there, too. 
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How else would you drive to Ohio from Chicago? Down I-57 and I-24 then cut through Kentucky lengthwise? Or, go up through Wisconsin, and then up one side of Michigan and down the other?
Actually, I nearly did that Wisconsin->Michigan->Ohio trip once. I had a few days to kill, and wanted to go camping in Nicolet and the UP and then head back to Ohio. My parents talked me out of it. I was a grown-ass man at the time, I shouldn’t have listened to them.
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I have to agree with you there! Beautiful part of the country, and great for camping.
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It took me years until I realised that Ceylon tea actually comes from Sri Lanka.
I was still very young then, and geography classes still were focusing on the two Germanys, but it it was quite a realisation for me that (other) countries change their name (and frontiers), too.
(And for other reasons than starting two world wars.)
I realised in the same period that maps can lie. This was something like a reverse epiphany, it clouded my mind and destroyed my beliefs.
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About 80% of Japan is also uninhabitable (as opposed to 100% of Montana).
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I’m not going up there any time soon, but man do I miss it. I wish I was there right now.
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just add Wisconsin and you have a nice roundtrip.
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Yep:
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i just saw you already made that connection a few mssgs. down.
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I can see this happening… but do you think it also opened you up to other possibilities, with regards to what history is and what it can be?
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Genealogy did that for me. Three generations back, and things start to get fuzzy. Nationality and ethnicity are not at all clear-cut.
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It certainly opened my mind to what history is, how it is made, and by whom.
What it can be, well… I’m currently working on a GIS project which will play a minor but still significant role in communal land use planning for the next 25 years, so: well, probably it changed my mind about what it COULD be if you had a fully-fleged GIS and enough resources to get the right data and do the right analysis… ^______^
They who have the power to change the maps change the world (or at least our perception of it).
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Actually Turkey extends west of the strait and at times in the past has extended considerably more west. Its borders with Iran, Iraq, Azerbaijan, Armenia and Georgia are non-obvious. They don’t follow rivers or mountains.
Still, when I was checking my recollections of this I came across a rather stupendous view of the Caspian Gates on Google Maps - so my time wasn’t wasted.
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But you are honest about it. You don’t go around claiming you know EXACTLY where Taiwan is, when you don’t. Like a Trump supporter would.
