No it’s not fake, of course it’s real (17 GIFs)

1

It’s not that embarrassing to not know things when you’re a kid. In fact, you have way more of license to fuck up when you’re a kid in that regard than you do as an adult.

Which is why these stories of blatantly wrong childhood beliefs are fascinating (and even more fascinating is how long some of these went on for, let’s just say a few of these folks weren’t kids when they found out they were full of shit).

2

So when I found out about Father Christmas I thought that meant reindeer weren’t real. It was only when I thought my boyfriend was taking the mick at the zoo saying “let’s go and see the reindeer” that I found out the real truth.

LivesWithCat

3

So when I was 8 my dad and I watched Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home. I didn’t really get the time travel part of the plot, so I spent many years convinced that humpback whales were extinct.

timetwister4

4

Not me, but my roommate thought turnips were a fictional vegetable until college.

Erisouls

5

I don’t know if this counts but I always thought that O’Rileys Auto Parts was a restaurant. I’d beg my dad to eat there. He eventually caved and took me to the Auto Store and I told him that he warned them that I was coming and had them change the whole “restaurant” to an auto parts store just to mess with me.

tlaine23

6

That snowflakes  actually look the way they are portrayed. I grew up in a temperate area with no snow, and just kind of assumed that snowflakes were just balls of frozen water and the intricate designs were just artistic interpretation, like stars don’t really have 5 points. It wasn’t until I moved to the east coast for college and a snowflake landed on me and I got to look at it up close that I realized each snowflake was actually beautiful and unique.

UrsalaSimia

7

I thought measles and mumps were made up diseases when I was younger. I had never heard of anyone that had them. My sole knowledge of them was from the Shel Silverstein poem ” I have the measles and the mumps, a gash, a rash and purple bumps…”

ravenscroft12

8

When I was a child, I had no idea that people lived in big cities. I thought they were just where people worked and people attended professional sporting events, and that they were just empty at night.

j_86_w

9

Not me and I’m probably late to this, but I moved to key west and am now dating a girl who grew up there. For those not familiar, key west is a 6 square mile island 90miles south of Miami, so agriculture is literally non existent there.

She told me a story about her younger brother, who when he was about 5-6 years old went on a road trip up to Orlando with the family. They passed a field and he was looking out the window and saw a field full of cows…he looks up at his mom and in disbelief says “COWS ARE REAL?????”

He legit though cows were like unicorns, made up creatures.

springtime08

10

Not me, but my grandmother: when I was younger and desperately wanted to be a palaeontologist, she always looked at me like she thought I was nuts.

A couple of years ago, it turned out that she thought dinosaurs weren’t real, and were something that were made up for TV shows — ‘like that Pokémon thing’.

Portarossa

11

The Tasmanian Devil. Thought Looney Tunes just made it up

Jaz0990

12

Narwhals

blackholes-suck

13

Totally thought Transylvania was a made up place for years. Vampires are pretend, and they come from Transylvania, so it was logical that the place they came from wasn’t real???

Notdavidblaine

14

When I was a small child I thought kings, queens, etc. didn’t actually exist and were made up for fairy tales – because you know, dragons and magic and stuff like that was made up, surely all the other things must’ve been, too. Imagine my shock when I was 4 or 5 and I learned that all those are real. (Although my child self still had very inaccurate ideas about royalty.)

Edit: Holy shit this blew up.

CzechMorticia

15

Pittsburg. My dad would say it and I’d laugh my ass off thinking of a town named after armpits. I always thought it was a fake place.

whalesalad

16

Pirates, I literally thought that they were fictional beings until i was around 22 

kaymarhyde

17

Hippos being dangerous.

There’s a ride at Disneyland called The Jungle Cruise, where you go through jungle scenes in a boat and the skipper tells jokes about the audio animatronic animals. In the bit with the hippos, they’ll say the hippos are going to rush the boat and then shoot a cap gun to scare them off. As a kid I thought this was another joke, because OBVIOUSLY hippos can’t hurt you, right? I was in my 20s before I found out the truth, which is that hippos will fuck you up.