I noticed the same thing as a native Texan living in northern Bavaria. It's caused me to seriously mix up east and west in Austria and Switzerland - in my mental map, Salzburg is to the left of Innsbruck, which is to the left of Switzerland. However, my mental map of northern Bavaria, along with the rest of Germany, is aligned east=right, west=left, north=up.

Result? Pretty much anywhere is somewhere I'm going "up" to, be it Salzburg or Hannover.