> > You can get joke upside-down world maps which show NZ at the centre top. Different views like that *do* look strange. It's interesting how deeply the "standard map view" of the world is ingrained in our minds.
>
> A fact a bit besides the thread subject: I skimmed through the book "Why Men Don't Listen & Women Can't Read Maps: How We're Different and What to Do About It" in a bookstore once, and found the section on why women can't read maps. It seems women have a hard time turning the maps in their minds, so they have to turn the maps physically instead. (Women, of course, have other advantages men don't have, but men are generally better at thinking spatially.)
>
> A British publisher made upside-down maps of Great Britain, and advertised that hey would give away 20000 of them for free. Among the people who ordered a free map, only 500 were men.
>
> Trav"that kind of supports the theory, doesn't it?"holt

I usually look (in my mind) at places (in Finland) from the direction where my home town, Kokkola, is. It gets difficult, though, when I live in Helsinki, south of Kokkola, and all my mental images of maps are upside-down compared to the maps here.

Juho