Uganda is a landlocked country in East Africa, unfortunately mostly known for negative things like the past dictator Idi Amin, recent not-so-fair elections, and the current ban on homosexuality, with even plans to introduce death penalty for it. Even now gays are shunned in the media and often killed. Despite these atrocities, Uganda has been [...]

Chad is a large landlocked country in Central Africa. It is one of the poorest and most corrupted countries of the world and most Westerners probably know nothing about it. As is common in Africa, it is home to over 200 ethnic groups and like many African countries, it unfortunately has a history of civil [...]

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 [...]

Senegal is a country in the very west of Africa, which completely surrounds the tiny Gambia, save for its tiny coastline. Sometimes the countries are called “Senegambia”. Owing to its colonial past most of the people speak French (besides African languages), but almost all are Muslims. In the west Senegal is probably best known for [...]

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 [...]

Venezuela is located in the north of South America. It was the first permanent settlement of the Spanish in South America, but gained its independence as early as 1821 thanks to the revolutionary Simón Bolïvar. He lended his name to Bolivia, but also remains in the official name of Venezuela, the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela, [...]

Zambia is a fairly large landlocked country in Southern central Africa. Besides 12 million people it hosts some stunning landscapes, particularly the Victoria falls (named by David Livingstone), often counted in the “seven natural wonders of the world”. Zambia used to be a part of United Kingdom until it gained independence in 1964. While English [...]

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 [...]

Swaziland is a small, landlocked country almost entirely cocooned by South Africa. It was formerly a colony of the United Kingdom, now ruled by king Mswati III. The people are mostly Swazis who speak the Bantu language Swazi (also known as siSwati). Even compared to other African countries, the impact of AIDS in Swaziland has [...]