Costa Rica is a small country in Central America. A 2009 study proclaimed it as both the happiest and greenest country in the world. In general it ranks pretty high in various human development indices. It is a former Spanish colony, but acquired its independence already in the 1800s. After a bloody civil war, in [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

Belize is a tiny country located in Central America, neighbouring Mexico and Guatemala. According to Wikipedia Belizeans eat a lot of chicken and fish, as well as the traditional Latin American staples like beans, cassava, bananas, plantains and coconut. “I had no idea Belizean cuisine even existed”, said a friend when I mentioned this dessert. [...]