J and I were having a discussion the other night about the states in the US. I’m not sure how this came about, but we realized that somehow despite being citizens raised in the US, we didn’t think we could identify all the countries on the map.
So we took a challenge: We printed out 2 copies of the US map. It had the states drawn in, and we gave ourselves 15 minutes to write in all the names. No list of states either – everything had to be done from memory.
I filled in as many as I could off the top of my head. Some were easy – like Hawaii, Alaska, Florida, Texas, and of course the west coast. Then I had to stop and think. Is New Mexico the one closer to Texas, or is that Arizona? Is Kansas on top of Nebraska or below it? I counted up the number I was 100% confident of and it came out to exactly 25. So 25 hopefully good guesses here I come!
About halfway through the 15 minutes I had filled in a good majority of them, but there were 10 I still couldn’t identify. I mean, let’s face it. I’ve been to NY once. Recently. I’ve never been anywhere else on the Northeastern seaboard. And I’ve never learned the shapes of those states (some states are easily identified by their shape – Kentucky looks like a chicken leg, Louisiana is an L, etc) because they’re so freaking tiny that there’s just a bunch of arrows pointing to them.
I did my best, but after 13 minutes I stopped. I had filled in 43 states and left the other 7 blank. Yes, I could only name 43 of the 50 states off the top of my head.
J and I compared answers, then compared them to the actual map. Ok I got New Mexico and Arizona right, but flipped Michigan and Wisconsin. I muffed the entire Northeastern seaboard – in fact, the only ones I got right were the ones that I could write the name in the state (Maine, New York and Pennsylvania). I missed all the ones that were small and required me to draw arrows. ALL of them.
All in all I got 34/50 correct. J got 36.The 7 I couldn’t for the life of me name were: Ohio, Indiana, Georgia, Mississippi, New Hampshire, Iowa, and Massachusetts. It’s hard when you’ve already named 43!
Ah yes, I truly am the “dumb American” people assume I am when I go traveling abroad 
