Masthead
One of my photos

What I did in my holidays…

March 21st, 2007 · Posted by Skuds in Life · 2 Comments · Life

While this site was down I got quite wrapped up in a couple of things. One of them was this fiendish quiz which I found a link to on a blog somewhere. I can’t remember where, and I’m not sure if I should thank the person who highlighted it or curse them…

It is an extremely simple concept: you just have to type in the names of all 192 member states of the United Nations within 10 minutes. Initially there was a bit of trial and error because you have to have the name exactly as the program expects, so it is “Saint Kitts and Nevis” and not “St. Kitts and Nevis” or “St. Kitts & Nevis” and it is “Gambia” and not “the Gambia” as it should be.

Before too long I was getting to the point of only missing a handful of places, or simply running out of time due to taking several attempts to spell Liechtenstein or Kyrgyzstan properly, but the closer I got, the more of an obsession it became to actually do it, particularly after having taken the time to type out “Democratic Republic of the Congo” and remembering obscure, exotic places like Sao Tome and Principe, Kiribati and Palau I found I had missed out Poland, Germany and Saudi Arabia.

While doing this I found myself wondering about some of these places which are just names on a map to most of us, and found myself looking a few up and becoming inceasingly fascinated by the sheer scale of the planet and the diversity of the countries.

Nauru was one place which opened my eyes. I’m not sure I had even heard of it before, and since it only has a population of 13,000 it is easily missed. It is the only republican state without an official capital, andthe main plank of its economy seems to be in providing an offshore detention centre for processing asylum seekers who want to go to Australia. What must life be like in a place like that?

Kazakhstan was another place which was almost totally obscure until Borat made it well-known, but looking at a world map the other night I realised that it is a country about as big as Western Europe, in fact it is the 9th largest country in the world.

Looking at the whole business of relative sizes and populations I was trying to put it all into perspective, especially these tiny countries, where I was wondering how small a place can be and still remain viable as a country. I came up with this: I compared them to Crawley.

Crawley has a population of about 100,000 in an area covering just short of 45km2. If Crawley was a country it would be the 201st biggest by population (on official figures) with 36 countries having fewer inhabitants. Its strange to think that Crawley has a larger population than Monaco, Liechtenstein and San Marino combined! In fact there are thirteen countries with lower population than Crawley who have a seat at the UN.

In terms of size, Crawley is larger than eight ‘proper’ countries – covering more ground than Monaco, Nauru and Gibraltar combined, with enough space left over for about 40 Vatican Cities.

But don’t tell Richard Symonds any of this – he might get inspired to drop his campaign for ‘Gatwick City” and start pressing for the Independent Republic of Gatwick.

Tags: ··

2 Comments so far ↓