Geography Bits

Geography was always a subject of disinterest for me. Except for some amount of "Australia - Flora and Fauna" and "The South West Monsoon", I don't remember much from the geography classes of school. But God has been great in working out my travel calendar and has provided a good bit of opportunity to see places. This has increased my interest in the world and the different cultures. Of late this interest has still been increased by.... a game! The Travelers IQ challenge game has been interesting and educating to me. It hasn't thought me too many new things, but has served as a refresher, a sort of catalyst that helped fill the void. My increased inquisitiveness made me research a bit on things that have confused me for years. Here are few things I learnt in geography recently, but wish had known earlier 1) Croatia is a country that came out of the erstwhile Yugoslavia. I had somehow thought that it came from USSR. Frederick Forsyth's "Avenger" helped me understand that Yugoslavia split into Slovenia, Croatia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Macedonia, Montenegro, and Serbia 2) West Indies is not a country! It is an ensemble of countries like Jamaica and Barbados that play as a single cricket team 3) If someone had asked me for the countries in the Australian continent, I would have probably said Australia, New Zealand, Tasmania and Papa New Guinea. Well, I am not sure of New Zealand anymore. Wiki says that New Zealand belongs to a continent called Zealandia. I get a bit confused in these kinds of trivia since I studied in school that there were only 7 continents and Zealandia is not one of them. 4) There are several countries that belong to multiple continents. My ex-colleagues from Alcatel who have traveled to Turkey have told me that Turkey is transcontinental. But I got to know of few more countries like Indonesia, Russia (though we all associate it with Europe, it is actually 71% in Asia!) and Egypt. Did you know that a part of Italy, Spain and Portugal are in Africa?