Speaking from personal experience if you live or were born in the District of Columbia and travel enough you're going to run into all sorts of misunderstandings, some funny and some almost tragic. Some I've kind of understood like the difficult Austrian border guard who didn't understand how I could have been born in the US but not in a state but have a German surname and speak German but live in Heidelberg and have a US passport. That was a fun half German, half English 20 minute conversation.
Then there was the US Immigration Officer in Dallas who asked me what state I was born in and when I answered he commenced to lecture me on the "fact" on how the District of Columbia was not a state. One of my all time favorites was a Pentagon personnel clerk processing me into a new job who mused that I was the "first white person she'd ever met born in DC". You just learn to laugh a bit, frown a bit and get on with life.
