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 [...]

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 [...]

Guadeloupe is an archipelago located in the Caribbean, in the Lesser Antilles. It is an overseas region of France and thus a part of the EU, using the euro as its official currency. It was named by Cristopher Columbus after the Spanish town of Guadalupe. The islands were devastated by numerous hurricanes in the 20th [...]

An Uyghur dish sounds very interesting, doesn’t it? Even better if you know who they are. The Uyghurs are an ethnic group of Turkic people living in Eastern and Central Asia, mostly in the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region in China, but also in other parts of China and several other nearby countries. Their total number [...]

Eritrea is a small country in the Horn of Africa, a single-party republic (gulp). In 2010 it received the lowerst press freedom rating in the world. It has been in constant problems, including a 30-year war, with the neighbouring Ethiopia. Eritrea used to host a large population of elephants, but currently there are thought to [...]

Tanzania is a fairly large country in East Africa, which is thought to be the earliest areas inhabited by humans and prehuman hominids, as far as two million years ago. Like many African countries, it gained independence (from the UK) in the early 1960s, as two separate countries, Zanzibar and Tanganyika, which merged soon afterwards, [...]

Ireland is one of the largest islands in the world. The northern tip of it belongs to the United Kingdom while the rest forms the Republic of Ireland. Besides English many Irish people also speak Irish, but it is no longer the main language. Ireland has a distinctive culture (much more than just beer, leprechauns [...]

Uzbekistan is a former Soviet state, now an independent Turkic state, a double-landlocked country (only surrounded by other landlocked countries) and the most populous country (over 27 million people) in Central Asia. The climate has significant temperature variation with summers being as warm as 40C (104F) and winters as cool as -23C (-9F). Numbers aside, [...]

Mauritius is a small island nation located in the southeast coast of Africa, a bit further away than Madagascar. There are a little over a million inhabitants, who are mostly a mix of Indian and African descents who speak Mauritian Creole, English and French. Hindus and catholics both make up about 35% of people respectively, [...]

Sorry for the lack of posts recently. I have some major life changes happening in the next weeks, so unfortunately posts will still be sparse until mid September or so, possibly even longer. Writing this blog has made me realize how little I remember of the geography lessons I had in school. Not only are [...]