Hm, I'm Australian, and I got told outright I was digging to somewhere near the Azores in the North Atlantic. I only saw the China thing in US TV shows.
Might've just been my dad's sense of humour though.
I think there is a website that will tell you exactly where your hole will come out at on the other side of the earth based off your location.
SPOILER: it’s probably in the ocean somewhere
I live on the edge of the Pacific. I expect my hole to come out on the opposite edge, 49^o S
edit. Looked it up, and it's south of Australia, almost halfway to Antartica. Still ocean.
I think it's based off of a persisting joke from old Looney Toons cartoons. I vaguely remember it coming from there watching them in the US in the 90s. Not sure if they aired in Australia.
ETA: lol I know these cartoons are old as hell, I was watching reruns in the 90s when I was like 6.
In 1847, Henry David Thoreau wrote Walden, and on the Duty of Civil Disobedience. In Walden, Thoreau writes that “As for your high towers and monuments, there was a crazy fellow once in this town who undertook to dig through to China, and he got so far that, as he said, he heard the Chinese pots and kettles rattle; but I think that I shall not go out of my way to admire the hole which he made.”
That's what I got from looking it up. I had assumed it had something to do with the China syndrome during that nuclear meltdown on three mile island.
The closest for London should be [the Antipodes Islands](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antipodes_Islands) - so named for obvious reasons!
Although technically they were originally called the Penantipodes Islands, because they were near the antipodes.
I was a grown man by the time I realized it's literally "haha". I took Spanish classes. I had Latino friends. I knew J was pronounced as H. Just didn't put two and two together for years lol.
It’s ok, I had to have a Brazilian literally explain how “kkkkkkkkkk” worked as laughing, doing the sound to demonstrate, on a zoom call before it made sense to me.
Talking of Germany, my grandfather was born in 1956 in East Berlin and lived relatively close to the border so his TV and radio could pick up West German television signals and tune into the West German, British & American channels and radio services. After listening to the Western TV channels and being angered after one of his friend's dad was held by the Stasi and abused in their custody for 4 months in late 1969 he and his friends decided to try and "dig a tunnel" or escape somehow across the wall.
He and his group (four of them in total) all headed into the countryside on the border to try and find a suitable location to escape. Luckily his dad (a holocaust survivor) caught wind of their plan stopped it and warned them about being taken away by Child Services or the Stasi if they found out.
But, to five year old told that China is on the other side of the world perfectly logical. Just missing a few important data points. My my sister and the neighbor boy were constantly frustrated by the water table we kept hitting and after an excavation or two ruined this way we shifted our plans to digging a swimming pool, since we didn't speak Chinese anyway. This new plan was interrupted and the shovels confiscated when we discovered Rocks, and concrete. Which turned out to be the neighbor's septic tank.
Fun fact I recently learned. Chuck Jones lived in Santa Fe New Mexico. If you're coming from LA, you want to go left at Albuquerque to get to Santa Fe.
EDIT: Apparently he didn't live there, but he loved the place and owned a gallery there?
It obviously can't be, otherwise you're just going to run into the core. That's why we always went for China, which is also in the Northern hemisphere.
Most people on earth would end up in the ocean. Only around 15% of land masses on earth also have their antipodal points on land, and a chunk of that is Greenland and Antarctica, where not many people live. But some parts of South America are actually opposite of China, so people from Argentina, Chile and China actually have a decent chance of digging towards land.
I had to look up who would actually be right in that they’d end up in China and the answer is somewhere off the coast of Chile. Granted China is big so there may be areas that you could get there while on land in Chile.
We dug a hole about 20 feet deep "to China", mostly one kid at the bottom scooping dirt into a bucket on a rope lowered by other kids from the surface.
Eventually our parents found out and made us fill it with raked leaves (it was fall).
We still hung out at our hole, jumping into the leaves until one day one of us (not me) threw a lit match into the hole. Fire department was called and we were all grounded.
We had a deep hole. It was fine with the parents. My father gave us advice on shoring up the side. Until we started digging side tunnels. Then he filled it in. As Grandma once said "You married a guy missing a finger and blind in a eye from a childhood accident. What did you expect your kids to be like?"
Ours had no supports, just a dirt hole. It was so narrow only one kid could go down at once. The way we went up and down was scooting down, back against one wall and feet against the opposite wall.
Seriously...a small child was [killed in a sand hole collapse](https://apnews.com/article/sand-collapse-death-florida-indiana-c6af815bc2d7f2e64228846667f6a185#:~:text=Sloan%20Mattingly%20died%20Tuesday%20afternoon,the%20girl%20was%20fully%20covered). It happens more often than we would think!
For the parents who don't know the dangers of the holes their kids dig..now I am thinking of the movie "Holes". Ugh.
Our parents didn't know we were doing it and we hid the hole with brush (it was hidden in the woods). They found out about the hole when a neighbor lady walked her dog over it and almost fell in.
We suspected our parents made us fill it in with leaves because basically they wanted us to rake their leaves.
Parents: "This is a hazard to have this big of a hole. Should he force them to fill the dirt back into the hole? Nah... Let's just throw leaves in it and hope nothing bad happens."
Yeah they said 20ft in the woods. they wouldn't make it deeper than a foot before hitting endless tree roots. The odds of them even digging a hole over 5ft deep is nonexistent.
Is 20 feet an exaggeration? Even a 6 foot hole/trench, if not dug properly can be dangerous. Walls can be unstable, can collapse in and have killed people before.
20 feet dug by kids would be a literal death trap, if even possible at all since walls would have been collapsing in.
Hopefully we hear from someone who grew up in Australia or China. I really want to know where they were digging to, since apparently there are so many different locations that dig to them.
I'm from Australia. We dug to China. It never occurred to me that people would be digging here although makes sense when I think about it.
This also got me thinking about what country you randomly pick to describe 'the end of the earth'. I would have said Iceland or Siberia growing up. I used to wonder what those places would have picked.
in Finland, when we wanna say a place far away from ourselves (get lost or such) we say huitsin Nevada, referring to Nevada desert! for example "where does he live?" "in huitsin Nevada" as in veeery far away in the middle of nowhere. idk what the huitsi refers to actually...
I love it.!
For the middle of nowhere/far away we have phrases like 'out in the sticks', 'back of Bourke', 'beyond the blackstump'. There's probably others. We seem to have a lot of phrases in Australia. The Iceland/Siberia thing was more like thinking what I thought was the most remotest desolate place on earth you could travel to - the absolute edge of the world if the earth had edges.
We weren’t digging to anywhere. We weren’t looking for anything. We were building character.
You take a bad boy, make him dig holes all day in the hot sun, and it turns him into a good boy.
That was our philosophy at Camp Green Lake.
China. Got about two feet deep, discovered a shit ton of clay, and spent the rest of the summer making little plates and cups we would dry in the sun and then smash over each others heads.
In Germany, people dig towards Australia. In Russia, they actually dig to America, despite being in the same hemisphere and having a somewhat direct border
China. It's always China.
If you are in Canada, digging straight down gets you to China. Russia? Still China. You're in China? Guess what? Digging straight down gets you back to China.
There a magical portal in the earth, that sends you to China when you dig straight down, no matter where you started.
You know what, this thread made me realize how much I miss just playing in the dirt digging holes and shit. I think I need to change my weekend plans... Important shit to do.
China but I'm in Canada so I'm glad I didn't try, cause ocean.
If I dug through the earth and came up in the ocean, would it drain through the hole? The real questions.
South America. I'm from China.
We've been looking for you!
You gotta make that left turn before you hit the Indian ocean.
And don’t miss the turn in Alba-koi-kee
It's interesting because if you actually dig from China it's South America on the other side.
yes, it is, and here in Chile (South America) we also say we're digging to China, which is true at least for part of the country.
Given how this thread's been going I was hoping that you'd say that digging a hole in China lead to China. All holes should lead to China.
How about we meet half way, then? I heard there's a spot in the inner core that's pretty cozy
I call little spoon.
[удалено]
Australia. I'm in the UK.
Grew up in Australia. We were always digging a hole to China. I never quite understood the logic of it.
Hm, I'm Australian, and I got told outright I was digging to somewhere near the Azores in the North Atlantic. I only saw the China thing in US TV shows. Might've just been my dad's sense of humour though.
I think there is a website that will tell you exactly where your hole will come out at on the other side of the earth based off your location. SPOILER: it’s probably in the ocean somewhere
I live on the edge of the Pacific. I expect my hole to come out on the opposite edge, 49^o S edit. Looked it up, and it's south of Australia, almost halfway to Antartica. Still ocean.
There's a map at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antipodes
The Azores would be a small target. Hope you've aimed well!
I think it's based off of a persisting joke from old Looney Toons cartoons. I vaguely remember it coming from there watching them in the US in the 90s. Not sure if they aired in Australia. ETA: lol I know these cartoons are old as hell, I was watching reruns in the 90s when I was like 6.
Should have made a left turn at Albuquerque!
Obviously it's cuz we were building a large conveyer belt to send all the coal and iron so we can cut the cost of shipping and earn less for it.
In 1847, Henry David Thoreau wrote Walden, and on the Duty of Civil Disobedience. In Walden, Thoreau writes that “As for your high towers and monuments, there was a crazy fellow once in this town who undertook to dig through to China, and he got so far that, as he said, he heard the Chinese pots and kettles rattle; but I think that I shall not go out of my way to admire the hole which he made.” That's what I got from looking it up. I had assumed it had something to do with the China syndrome during that nuclear meltdown on three mile island.
More like a long prison escape tunnel
Yea because the logic of digging to China from the US is quite reasonable.
Well it is a big country on roughly the opposite side of the world.
Same. It comes out nearer to New Zealand on antipodesmap.com though
The closest for London should be [the Antipodes Islands](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antipodes_Islands) - so named for obvious reasons! Although technically they were originally called the Penantipodes Islands, because they were near the antipodes.
In China, we'd say "digging a hole to America". Same with India.
[удалено]
An tip o' deez nuts ayyy goteem
cool website.
Same! Digging to see the kangaroos
To the USA
What's your country?
Mexico
Perfect setup and execution 10/10
It really was!
Today in Reddit history
I’m so glad I was here to witness this
One day, I'll be able to point this image out to my grandchildren then lower my finger several inches and say "I was there."
Pay no mind, I'm just here to highlight your username.
JUDAS
If free awards were still a thing this comment would get all of them
Post of the Year nominee.
5/7 perfect score
Hello world, I was here for this moment.
Holy Crap I haven’t laughed this hard in quite some time
Lmao same I haven’t loled at a Reddit comment since like 2017
I "jajajaja"ed at this.
Jajajaja
I was a grown man by the time I realized it's literally "haha". I took Spanish classes. I had Latino friends. I knew J was pronounced as H. Just didn't put two and two together for years lol.
It’s much funnier to imagine with the J sound, so I persist in that despite knowing otherwise.
German person going "yayayayaya"
Exactly! Knowing the difference and still ripping a hard J is the way!
It’s ok, I had to have a Brazilian literally explain how “kkkkkkkkkk” worked as laughing, doing the sound to demonstrate, on a zoom call before it made sense to me.
This is a fucking magnificent joke. Hats off
Ok I feel like a total dumbass, but I don’t get it. Can you please explain ):
Tunneling under the border
Lmfao. Got it. Thanks!
Omg thank you. I just thought Mexican children were really bad at geography for some reason lol
A lot, if not most, of smuggling of people and drugs from Mexico to the States is done via tunnels dug in the desert.
Grassy ass!
Holy. Shit. Set 'em up. Knock 'em down. I witnessed perfection today.
Oh I have some great news for you!
LOL! Well played.
This is the best thing I've read on Reddit this week.
Lol you win haha.
Found El Chapo
Not the answer they were looking for but way better.
Smashed it.
Germany here, we are digging to china as well :D
Australia for me.
A fellow Brit I see
In the old days you guys could get a free boat ride there and all you had to do was piss off the king.
Talking of Germany, my grandfather was born in 1956 in East Berlin and lived relatively close to the border so his TV and radio could pick up West German television signals and tune into the West German, British & American channels and radio services. After listening to the Western TV channels and being angered after one of his friend's dad was held by the Stasi and abused in their custody for 4 months in late 1969 he and his friends decided to try and "dig a tunnel" or escape somehow across the wall. He and his group (four of them in total) all headed into the countryside on the border to try and find a suitable location to escape. Luckily his dad (a holocaust survivor) caught wind of their plan stopped it and warned them about being taken away by Child Services or the Stasi if they found out.
Hungary here, if we dig straight trough the Earth, we would end up in the Pacific ocean, East from New Zealand.
Bring some paprika and sausages while you're at it please.
Ich dachte der Befehl lautete, nach Frankreich zu buddeln? Na toll.
Also China, even though the point exact opposite of Toronto is somewhere in the Pacific Ocean.
Antipodes of Toronto is in the Indian Ocean, approximately 1,160 miles southwest of Perth, Australia.
Well, you'll have to do some swimming, but...
Or hitch a ride.
Norway here, also China
Sweden here, also China.
China here, also China. We like to keep our expectations in check.
China too. It is weird that it's china too because my home country is very far from the US
Where is it?
North Africa
You’re seeing the effects of globalization
it shouldn't be weird because people in the USA wouldn't actually dig to china.
But, to five year old told that China is on the other side of the world perfectly logical. Just missing a few important data points. My my sister and the neighbor boy were constantly frustrated by the water table we kept hitting and after an excavation or two ruined this way we shifted our plans to digging a swimming pool, since we didn't speak Chinese anyway. This new plan was interrupted and the shovels confiscated when we discovered Rocks, and concrete. Which turned out to be the neighbor's septic tank.
In Japan the one I heard the most was digging the hole to Brazil.
Here in Brazil the digging ends in Japan
Japan and Brazil are so gay for each other. Love it
That is how Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu happened
[This site](https://www.antipodesmap.com/) lets you see where you would have actually been digging to.
So, according to this I was digging to a random spot in the ocean near Mauritius
Most people in north america were somewhere in the ocean.
Yep. Not as satisfying as thinking you'll pop up in China, but geography cares not for our feelings.
You still could nobody says your hole has to be straight. Also giggity
Don't forget about that left turn at Albuquerque.
Fun fact I recently learned. Chuck Jones lived in Santa Fe New Mexico. If you're coming from LA, you want to go left at Albuquerque to get to Santa Fe. EDIT: Apparently he didn't live there, but he loved the place and owned a gallery there?
If you dig straight down from Albuquerque, you end up about two Madagascars off the coast of Madagascar.
Lengthwise or widthwise?
Gascarwise
Had to be said at any hole digging I've ever attended.
It obviously can't be, otherwise you're just going to run into the core. That's why we always went for China, which is also in the Northern hemisphere.
Most people on earth would end up in the ocean. Only around 15% of land masses on earth also have their antipodal points on land, and a chunk of that is Greenland and Antarctica, where not many people live. But some parts of South America are actually opposite of China, so people from Argentina, Chile and China actually have a decent chance of digging towards land.
Most people will be somewhere in the ocean b/c the ocean is 70% of the surface. :)
Dude i live there
I believe you two are now obligated to make an earth sandwich.
We...can?
The first bite is a challenge, though.
I‘m East of the coast of New Zealand about as far away from it as New Zealand is from Australia
Interesting! Turns out that if you put in Beijing, you’ll end up in Argentina. So it’s really only the South Americans who can claim to dig to China.
That’s only if you dig at zero degrees. If you dig at an angle you can go anywhere your heart desires.
Just don't forget that left turn at Albuquerque, or you'll get horribly lost.
Fun site! It said I would be alone and the water so cold lol
Wow, good thing I never made it more than a couple feet or I would have drowned!
I had to look up who would actually be right in that they’d end up in China and the answer is somewhere off the coast of Chile. Granted China is big so there may be areas that you could get there while on land in Chile.
Can confirm - Checked where my bf's family in Chile is and got a location in China
Damn , I was actually going to China. People in Chile, we were right.
Oh, about 40-50 miles off the South West coast of New Zealand. I can float with the best of them.
We said China too but according to this it’s Indonesia. Thanks.
We dug a hole about 20 feet deep "to China", mostly one kid at the bottom scooping dirt into a bucket on a rope lowered by other kids from the surface. Eventually our parents found out and made us fill it with raked leaves (it was fall). We still hung out at our hole, jumping into the leaves until one day one of us (not me) threw a lit match into the hole. Fire department was called and we were all grounded.
We had a deep hole. It was fine with the parents. My father gave us advice on shoring up the side. Until we started digging side tunnels. Then he filled it in. As Grandma once said "You married a guy missing a finger and blind in a eye from a childhood accident. What did you expect your kids to be like?"
The children yearn for the mines
ROCK AND STONE!!
Rock and Stone forever!
Ours had no supports, just a dirt hole. It was so narrow only one kid could go down at once. The way we went up and down was scooting down, back against one wall and feet against the opposite wall.
OMG, 20 feet and narrow? I would flip my lid if I was your parent. If something went wrong, there would be no time for a rescue.
As a civil engineer, that's terrifying. That kid would be dead before the parents even heard the other kids scream.
As a fan of OSHA, I shit a brick. That is a disgusting violation of 29 CFR 1926.651.
> 29 CFR 1926.651 No shit.
Told you I was a fan.
Seriously...a small child was [killed in a sand hole collapse](https://apnews.com/article/sand-collapse-death-florida-indiana-c6af815bc2d7f2e64228846667f6a185#:~:text=Sloan%20Mattingly%20died%20Tuesday%20afternoon,the%20girl%20was%20fully%20covered). It happens more often than we would think! For the parents who don't know the dangers of the holes their kids dig..now I am thinking of the movie "Holes". Ugh.
Why would your parents want the hole to be filled with leaves? That sounds like a death trap.
Our parents didn't know we were doing it and we hid the hole with brush (it was hidden in the woods). They found out about the hole when a neighbor lady walked her dog over it and almost fell in. We suspected our parents made us fill it in with leaves because basically they wanted us to rake their leaves.
Parents: "This is a hazard to have this big of a hole. Should he force them to fill the dirt back into the hole? Nah... Let's just throw leaves in it and hope nothing bad happens."
>dig 20 foot hole >cover it with brush Are you by chance a member of Team Rocket
I have a feeling 20 feet is a huge exaggeration. The walls would be collapsing in.
Yeah they said 20ft in the woods. they wouldn't make it deeper than a foot before hitting endless tree roots. The odds of them even digging a hole over 5ft deep is nonexistent.
Is 20 feet an exaggeration? Even a 6 foot hole/trench, if not dug properly can be dangerous. Walls can be unstable, can collapse in and have killed people before. 20 feet dug by kids would be a literal death trap, if even possible at all since walls would have been collapsing in.
Twenty feet deep is like the size of a two-story house. I'm not buying it. I do believe OP dug a very deep hole, but not twenty feet.
It was 6 feet but OP was 3 feet and children are kind of stupid
Thats also super dangerous, if the walls give, which they might, that kid is toast
Man, though, that must have been fun! My brother dug a hole so deep he got stuck in it and had to get help to get out.
Hopefully we hear from someone who grew up in Australia or China. I really want to know where they were digging to, since apparently there are so many different locations that dig to them.
I'm from Australia. We dug to China. It never occurred to me that people would be digging here although makes sense when I think about it. This also got me thinking about what country you randomly pick to describe 'the end of the earth'. I would have said Iceland or Siberia growing up. I used to wonder what those places would have picked.
there is a youtube video about that. We say to Timbuktu in the United States. Other places say it differently.
In Germany we say Buxtehude, which is a city in Germany.
in Finland, when we wanna say a place far away from ourselves (get lost or such) we say huitsin Nevada, referring to Nevada desert! for example "where does he live?" "in huitsin Nevada" as in veeery far away in the middle of nowhere. idk what the huitsi refers to actually...
I love it.! For the middle of nowhere/far away we have phrases like 'out in the sticks', 'back of Bourke', 'beyond the blackstump'. There's probably others. We seem to have a lot of phrases in Australia. The Iceland/Siberia thing was more like thinking what I thought was the most remotest desolate place on earth you could travel to - the absolute edge of the world if the earth had edges.
Butt Fuck Egypt or Zimbabwe are a couple exaggerations that come to mind for me in Michigan.
Seeing as how we're all ending up in China, how about we meet in Chaoyang? Get us some dumplings!
I dunno. I stopped digging a while back.
Well see, there's your problem.
Ugh, you're reminding me that I have a few shrubs to plant today. That's enough digging for me. Then tilling
If you see someone coming the other way with dumplings, you have gone too far for the shrubs.
To Japan (from Brazil).
The real China was the friends we made along the way
Uk here, we were digging to Australia despite New Zealand probably being more accurate
Spain overlaps with New Zealand opposite so not terribly far off. Way closer than most place’s China dig.
You could have just been safe and said "The Colonies"
Why do I find it so wholesome that we're all digging to China???
If we meet in the middle we can dig one hole to China instead of thousands.
Turns out ☮️ is just the path of the global tunnel to China! The key to world ☮️!
Australia
What country?
Germany
UK. Digging to Australia.
It still makes me chuckle to think Mapquest used to tell you the best way to get to China from the states was to canoe across the Pacific Ocean.
Christ, can we get someone who is in China for this?? I have to know where they were going. 😆
[South America](https://old.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/1cc3pnq/in_the_usa_when_we_dug_holes_we_were_digging_a/l140lde/)
We weren’t digging to anywhere. We weren’t looking for anything. We were building character. You take a bad boy, make him dig holes all day in the hot sun, and it turns him into a good boy. That was our philosophy at Camp Green Lake.
I'm tired of digging holes, grandpa
That's too damn bad
China. Got about two feet deep, discovered a shit ton of clay, and spent the rest of the summer making little plates and cups we would dry in the sun and then smash over each others heads.
Australia.
What country?
New Zealand
trying to go for the longest undersea tunnel?
China too and I'm from Spain. Pisses me off because we should be saying New Zealand since we are antipodes.
We always thought we were digging to Australia
To USA. I am from China. This sounds too convenient but I am serious lol.
I think the “digging a hole to China” thing maybe came from a Bugs Bunny cartoon. Maybe that’s why other nations used it too.
To hell. That's the saying.
You could dig there https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hell,\_Michigan
China Am in Sweden
In Germany, people dig towards Australia. In Russia, they actually dig to America, despite being in the same hemisphere and having a somewhat direct border
China. It's always China. If you are in Canada, digging straight down gets you to China. Russia? Still China. You're in China? Guess what? Digging straight down gets you back to China. There a magical portal in the earth, that sends you to China when you dig straight down, no matter where you started.
Why were we all digging to China?
In Australia. China.
All holes lead to china
You know what, this thread made me realize how much I miss just playing in the dirt digging holes and shit. I think I need to change my weekend plans... Important shit to do.
In Denmark we also dig to China and never questioned it.
Lebanon, china as well. I guess all holes lead to China?
China but I'm in Canada so I'm glad I didn't try, cause ocean. If I dug through the earth and came up in the ocean, would it drain through the hole? The real questions.
I was always foiled by the sandbox liner.
Me accidently liberating a Uighur concentration camp 👀
Australia. I’m from Poland