Palestine. What can one say about Palestine without opening a can of worms? Probably nothing, seeing as a large part of the world’s countries don’t recognize the independence of this Middle Eastern state. Besides the current, contested area (which refers to two separate geographical areas, West Bank and the Gaza Strip, inside of Israel, during [...]

Quebec is the second largest province in Canada and essentially a country of its own, French-speaking, mostly Catholic and culturally different from the rest of Canada. Many Quebecers would like it to be independent, but so far the idea has been turned down in referendums. If it was a country, it would be a huge [...]

Romania is a large country bordering (somewhat) the Black Sea. The name comes from a Latin word meaning “the citizen of Rome”. Not surprisingly, the Romanian language is also a Romance language, linguistically quite close to French and Italian. Romania has one of the largest areas of undisturbed forests in Europe with about half of [...]

Hawaii is a state of the United States (since 1959), but since it’s so far from the mainland both geographically and culturally it gets its own entry. It is an archipelago of hundreds of volcanic islands, of which the eight are known as the main islands. Only about 10 % of the people are Pacific [...]

Luxembourg is a member of the Benelux countries along with the Belgium and the Netherlands. It is among the smallest countries in the world (definitely among those that are real countries – as in not Vatican and such – and are not island nations). It’s also the world’s only remaining sovereign grand duchy, which means [...]

Cape Verde is an archipelago of ten volcanic islands located near the coast of West Africa. They were uninhabited until the Portuguese colonization in the 15th century and later served as an important hub in the slave trade because of their location. Now it houses about 500,000 people, mostly of creole origin. Cape Verde is [...]

Cook Islands is a “self-governing parliamentary democracy in free association with New Zealand”. What is more interesting than this bureaucratic monster of a word is that it has about 20,000 inhabitants, while there are nearly 60,000 people of Cook Islander descent living in New Zealand (a unique situation, perhaps?). The group of fifteen small islands [...]

Neighboured by Spain, Portugal is the westernmost country in Europe. It has had a number of colonies in its history. Most people know that Portuguese is spoken in Brazil, but also in some African and Asian countries such as Angola and East Timor. Still, unlike most former colonial powers, Portugal remains rather homogenic religion and [...]

Latvia is a fairly small and sparsely populated ex-Soviet country located in the Baltic region, between Estonia and Lithuania. Lithuanian and Latvian are the only Baltic languages remaining in the world. Latvian food is similar to that in other Baltic and Northern European countries with some Russian and German influences. Focus is on meat, fish, [...]

Again sorry for not posting, blah blah blah. Not only have I been very busy with the move, I have also lost my cooking mojo. The selection of fresh veg and fruit is just so amazing and cheap here in Amsterdam compared to Finland (e.g. fresh green beans are 1/10 of the price!) that I [...]