world geography

So, I had been thinking lately that there were a lot of countries in the world that I'd never even heard of, and many more that I'd heard of but had only a vague idea of where they are, who their neighbors(*) are, or what they are shaped like. Like most Americans, if I were asked to label countries on a blank map of Eastern Europe, I would have only known Poland, Greece, and Russia for sure, and been able to guess a few more.

So two days ago, I decided to fix that. I thought it was a project that would take months, but as it turns out, I now basically know all the countries in the world, and where they are, aside from various tiny Islands, like those in Oceana and the Carribean. On Wednesday, I started with South America because I figured I already knew at least half of those. I was surprised to realize that within about 10-15 minutes, I could point to a blank map and name all of them. So then I added Central America, which was even easier because there are only 7 countries, and all of them I had at least heard of. (Not so with South America, I had never heard of Suriname.). Wow, that's basically all of the Western Hemisphere, aside from the islands... not a bad start!

Encouraged by this, I moved on to Europe. To my surprise, I had them all down within an hour or so. After that, I moved to Asia. Asia was the hardest for me that day, since I've never been there and it's so far from anything in my life, but after another hour or two I had all of the countries in Asia memorized. I went back to try the Europe map again just to make sure I hadn't forgotten it.

So in one day, I went from hardly knowing where half of these countries are, to knowing pretty much the whole world except Africa. I suppose at some point I did memorize most of them in grade school, although geography was always my worst subject and the only class I ever got a D in growing up. I think at that time, it seemed so pointless, memorizing random manmade borders in places I had never been or even heard about. Whatever of them I had memorized for the test, surely faded quickly afterwards. And many boundaries have changed now, especially due to the breakup of the Soviet Union and Yugoslavia. Now it seems far more interesting, because I hear about lots of these places in the news and have various cultural associations with most of the names, and have met people from some of the places.

Yesterday, I went and tackled most of Africa. Africa was way harder than anything else, even Asia. And it had the highest concentration of countries I'd never heard of. So I memorized most of it yesterday, but left the Western part till today, since it is filled with tiny countries that were completely unfamiliar to me. Countries like The Gambia, Cote d'lvoire, Burkina Faso, Togo, and Benin. (I think The Gambia may be the only country other than The Bahamas that starts with "The"... actually maybe The Virgin Islands, if you're supposed to put a The in front of it. [Update: ah, The Netherlands, how could I forget them? maybe the Gambia is the only non-plural one though.]) I had also never heard of Lesotho or Berundi. Some like Gabon and Senegal rang some sort of very vague bell, although not enough that I would have been sure they were countries. At any rate, after a bit more time today, I've pretty much got Africa down. I don't know how long all of this is going to last in my memory though, so I should probably do a refresh in a couple weeks.

At any rate, I'd highly recommend trying this exercise, if you haven't already--it should only take a few hours to get most of the world down. I will feel much more confident listening to the news about what's going on in places like Rwanda now that I actually know where they are :)

Among European countries, I think the only two I had never heard of were San Moreno and Andorra. Although after reading up on Andorra it actually does sound familiar now.

While going through, I noticed all sorts of surprising things that made me stop and think. For example, Kazakhstan is completely unbelievably gigantic... for some reason I pictured it as a tiny obscure country, but no... not at all. It's the 9th largest country in the world in terms of land area. For comparison, Greenland is 13th and Mexico is 15th. If someone had asked me "which is bigger, Mexico or Kazakhstan" I would have said "obviously Mexico". Nope! Iran and Sudan are also bigger than I thought, and Saudi Arabia is a bit smaller. Would you believe Sudan is also bigger than Greenland and Mexico?! Also surprising is the size of Madagascar--I had pictured it as this little insignificant island, but actually it's bigger than Spain! (See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Land_area for the whole list.)

The most interesting and confusing border region I found is the boundary of India near where it, Nepal, Bhutan, and Bangladesh come together. There's a thin strip of land only about 20-miles wide near a town called Karkarbhitta that looks kind of like a winding river, that goes through near where these other countries almost intersect with each other. This strip of land is part of India, and connects two much bulkier regions of India that would otherwise be completely separated.

(*) I just noticed that Firefox's spellchecker doesn't know the word "neighbor" or "neighbors", how bizarre. This is not an uncommon word at all! I have noticed other fairly common words that it thinks are not words, but this one is ridiculous!