when have you realised ?

I remember my aunty travelling abroad when I was a very young boy, so I was made to understand the concept of a bigger world quite early.

And you will even more when you'll travel some of them

Well I suppose no-one can really grasp the true scale of the population of the world. I mean we can all say, oh yeah, the world population is 6 billion+, but it isn't really a number that we can comprehend. Same way it's so hard to understand how space is infinite and such things that just make your brain hurt when you try to think about it, lol

For me though I guess it isn't something that suddenly happened, but as I've gotten older I've realised it more and more, the way you can just go on a train somewhere and on the way you see hundreds, maybe thousands, of different people, all going about their own lives, and you probably rarely see the same person twice, even on such a small scale as a daily train journey or something.

When I was younger, my grandparents traveled quite a bit. They used to send my brother and I postcards from places like England, Ireland, Switezerland, Barbados and Florida. My dad would show us where we lived and where our grandparents had visited whenever we got a postcard in the mail.

I also remember watching the Berlin Wall fall and I vividly remember watching the Persian Gulf War on tv. I couldn't understand why it was night time in Europe and the Middle East when I was daytime at home. Then my parents explained again how far Berlin and Iraq were from Canada.

Stephanie

Something just came back to me. I was 7 i think, maybe 8 ... our teacher told us a friend of her, who lives in Tchad is going to visit us. And she explained a bit the situation (war) and we had to prepare some questions. I remember my question was "why is there a war ?" and he answered, "men are nasty". Maybe it was at this time i realised, because even the parents were interested about this visitor at school, everyone was talking about him and some wanted to meet him. And then, when he left, our teacher didn't want to cry but we all saw she was sad, and she explained us, she was sad because her friend lives so far away, she didn't know when she's going to see him again. So all this was new, Africa was far, life was very different, so different on some subjects that it didn't even sound real sometimes to us. And on the map, after this visit, there was something that we knew a bit better, we made some drawings of Africa during weeks

I think I realized the world was bigger than I had thought sometime around age 5-6. Probably no later than 8.

Adrian

Id been around the world by the time I was 7 so I realised early on how big it all was, just thought every one esle was flying round the world to , so it was weird to find out people didnt and they actually lived in one house for years.

Dawn