The Joy of Geography
Yesterday I asked E how many countries he thought he could name. He said maybe eighty. I thought I could pretty easily name 100. I figured we would leave it at that, but after lunch E handed me some post-it notes and a pen and suggested that we tally up all the countries we could name.
E took this week off from work, which is why we had time for an afternoon geography jam session. I know naming countries isn't everyone's idea of vacation fun, but it was a rainy day and we had warm beverages to drink, and we enjoyed ourselves.
We went continent by continent with E naming as many countries as he could and me adding any I knew that he'd forgotten. Then we looked on google maps and wondered things like, "Suriname is understandable**, but how could we have forgotten Nicaragua?" and "how do you want to count the US Virgin Islands? What about Puerto Rico?" We chatted about colonialism and less Eurocentric terms for "Middle East," such as "Western Asia," and we decided to count Tibet as a country because we'd like to live in a world where that's true.
Tallying up countries is kind of a funny exercise for two people who think borders are harmful. But, at least for me, it's also an exercise in imagining the wider world and remembering how many people are out there living their lives in cultures and languages distinct from my own.
In the end, we both exceeded our own expectations: E named 91 countries and I named 138. Being able to name countries (and locate them on a map) is trivia, but I don't think it's trivial.
**I said that forgetting Suriname is understandable, not as a slight to Suriname, but because E and I studied Spanish throughout high school. This means we were quizzed regularly on the Spanish-speaking countries of Central and South America, but not on Brazil, Guyana, French Guiana, or Suriname.