Djibouti is a tiny country in the Horn of Africa, mostly consisting of stony semidesert, with a population of less than a million. It used to belong to France and still maintains close relations to France. French is the official language and the currency is known as the Djibouti Franc. It is, however, also an [...]

Vietnam is a quite long but mostly very narrow country located in the Indochina peninsula in Southeast Asia. A former colony of France, the country suffered a a war from the 1950s/1960s until 1975, which killed millions of people, also many in the neighbouring countries. (For some reasons, many Americans think the U.S. “won” the [...]

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 [...]

Trinidad is the larger of the two main islands that form the Trinidad and Tobago, located just a few kilometers off the coast of Venezuela. The name, given by Columbus, means “trinity” in Spanish. It used to be a British colony until gaining independence in 1962. Only about 60,000 of its about one million inhabitants [...]

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, [...]

Most people only know Haiti as the location of the tragic earthquake in early 2010, and that it is a very poor country, the poorest country in the Americas. It is located in the same island of Hispaniola as Dominican republic. It was the first independent country in Latin America and the first black-led republic [...]

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, [...]

Angola is a large country on the south-central coast of Africa. Until 1975 it was a territory of Portugal and as a result the population is largely Portuguese-speaking and Catholic country, although Bantu languages and indigenous religions also form large minorities. After Angola gained independence there was a civil war lasting until 2002 and killing [...]

Located in the South of South America, Chile is the most elongated country in the world, being 4,300 kilometers long but on average just 175 km wide. It houses a variety of different climates from rainy temperate areas to glaciers and the driest desert in the world, Atacama. It is one of the most developed [...]

Armenia is a small landlocked country located in the Caucasus that used to be a part of the Soviet Union. It is usually considered to be a part of Asia, but sometimes counted in Europe as well (e.g. Wikipedia lists it as a “bicontinental country” and it is also a member of the Council of [...]