pin the capital on the country.
Sep. 18th, 2009 09:32 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
serynOne of the things I think was drastically missing from my education is a knowledge of geography. I graduated from university without really being aware that Vietnam and Korea were physically different places. My school had old maps and the teacher would usually say, "Don't bother memorizing these, a lot of the countries have changed names." So my experience with Korea is from the tv show MASH, which looks a lot like southern California. And Vietnam was from movies... and those looked a lot like southern California. The actors in the backgrounds all looked about the same. Casting probably collected all the professional actors who looked Asian enough and told them not to worry because Americans can't tell the difference anyway.
But I remember being a few months from graduation and being asked if I wanted to get Vietnamese food and saying, "No, I don't really like restaurants with kim chee."
In my adult life, I have steadily worked on this. If you give me a globe with country outlines, I can tell you the name of all the non-island countries. (Those South Pacific and Caribbean things are all jumbled in my head. I couldn't pick out which was Barbados and which was Martinique, for example.) There is some fuzziness in some of Eastern Europe because I'm not sure what's going on with Serbia, Bosnia, H-G, Yugoslavia, Slovenia, Croatia. I learned it one way and figured that was good enough for now. I can match the capital to any country I can find. (If it's one of those island countries, there's no hope, I'm just guessing.)
I was really shocked by how close Africa and Europe are. I was floored by where the Tigris and Euphrates rivers are. I was stunned by where the Nile actually goes and that there are several branches of Nile. There is Nile in Ethiopia, famous for its decades long famine that launched late-night guilt-fest infomercials and made cable television seem like a wasteland.
When there were those pirates from Somalia, my SO asked why anyone would be sailing near Africa and I said, "Because the Suez Canal goes through that hook of Egypt. If you want to get a ship from the Mediterranean to the Indian Ocean, you're going to sail right past Somalia."
You know what used to confuse me in the 1980s? We were always fighting in Beirut. That's not a country. It's the capital of Lebanon. I don't think the news ever mentioned that.
Currently the confusing thing is Dubai. That's a city-state in the United Arab Emirates. (The "country" is a federation of "emirates" which are basically city-states.) Dubai isn't even the capital, which is Abu Dhabi. The travel posters advertising non-stop flights to Dubai make me smirk because they seem like being in Australia or Italy and advertising trips to Iowa. I guess Dubai is more recognizable, like Los Angeles or Chicago or New York City. But it still amuses me because I feel like a rare person knowing that Dubai is a city in the UAE and having a clue where that is on the globe.
I think we should have a government sponsored, updated to match the current diplomatic reality, flash-based geography game. I think everyone should be encouraged to play. There are flash-based geography games already, but they're not kept up-to-date. Most of them are also regional which causes some problems in understanding the relative distances and relationships. Like the Somalia piracy problems... if you've only seen Africa in an isolated map, it's really unclear why anyone would ever go anywhere near there. But it's only 50 miles or so from Europe near the Cape of Gibraltar!
I didn't want to know any of this stuff, not really. But it started to be embarrassing when I would make ridiculous errors. Kim chee.
But I remember being a few months from graduation and being asked if I wanted to get Vietnamese food and saying, "No, I don't really like restaurants with kim chee."
In my adult life, I have steadily worked on this. If you give me a globe with country outlines, I can tell you the name of all the non-island countries. (Those South Pacific and Caribbean things are all jumbled in my head. I couldn't pick out which was Barbados and which was Martinique, for example.) There is some fuzziness in some of Eastern Europe because I'm not sure what's going on with Serbia, Bosnia, H-G, Yugoslavia, Slovenia, Croatia. I learned it one way and figured that was good enough for now. I can match the capital to any country I can find. (If it's one of those island countries, there's no hope, I'm just guessing.)
I was really shocked by how close Africa and Europe are. I was floored by where the Tigris and Euphrates rivers are. I was stunned by where the Nile actually goes and that there are several branches of Nile. There is Nile in Ethiopia, famous for its decades long famine that launched late-night guilt-fest infomercials and made cable television seem like a wasteland.
When there were those pirates from Somalia, my SO asked why anyone would be sailing near Africa and I said, "Because the Suez Canal goes through that hook of Egypt. If you want to get a ship from the Mediterranean to the Indian Ocean, you're going to sail right past Somalia."
You know what used to confuse me in the 1980s? We were always fighting in Beirut. That's not a country. It's the capital of Lebanon. I don't think the news ever mentioned that.
Currently the confusing thing is Dubai. That's a city-state in the United Arab Emirates. (The "country" is a federation of "emirates" which are basically city-states.) Dubai isn't even the capital, which is Abu Dhabi. The travel posters advertising non-stop flights to Dubai make me smirk because they seem like being in Australia or Italy and advertising trips to Iowa. I guess Dubai is more recognizable, like Los Angeles or Chicago or New York City. But it still amuses me because I feel like a rare person knowing that Dubai is a city in the UAE and having a clue where that is on the globe.
I think we should have a government sponsored, updated to match the current diplomatic reality, flash-based geography game. I think everyone should be encouraged to play. There are flash-based geography games already, but they're not kept up-to-date. Most of them are also regional which causes some problems in understanding the relative distances and relationships. Like the Somalia piracy problems... if you've only seen Africa in an isolated map, it's really unclear why anyone would ever go anywhere near there. But it's only 50 miles or so from Europe near the Cape of Gibraltar!
I didn't want to know any of this stuff, not really. But it started to be embarrassing when I would make ridiculous errors. Kim chee.
no subject
Date: 2009-09-19 06:11 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-09-19 05:27 pm (UTC)The best flash geography games I have found are from Shepherd Software. If they had a world variant or one could spin a globe and do the highlighted region, that would be amazing. Their stuff is all by continent and I think it would be really useful to understand where Georgia is in comparison to Libya.
http://www.sheppardsoftware.com/African_Geography.htm