learn the names and locations of the countries of the world

It’s been more difficult with Africa because I know a lot less about many of the countries there – and just names with nothing to associate them with are more difficult to remember. It doesn’t help that the website I’ve been using for this has much less information on the African countries for some reason. But that got me to reading up about many of them in Wikipedia, which is fascinating, but takes much longer. I’ve now worked my way down to Mozambique, Zimbabwe, Botswana and Namibia, so I’ll be able to move on to a new region soon. Next: Asia.

I’m really enjoying learning this, even more than I thought I would. The site I’m working with gives me a paragraph or two on each country, so it’s not just the location but also often something about its history and character, which makes it that much more interesting, and consequently easier to remember. And it feels really good to finally know something about all these places mentioned in the news. It’s good to learn about the world.

working from the very northwest with Iceland, UK and Ireland, and driving in two directions, one towards the east through Norway, Sweden, Finland and down, the other via Portugal and eastwards, taking in the smaller countries like Andorra and Liechtenstein and San Marino, learning a few countries a day.

Imagine if it were a map of war, we would have two giant arrows (blue/good or red/evil?), in a pincer movement taking in the whole of Europe. The two have recently joined forces in Poland and are now sweeping down towards Greece and Turkey.

I am a pacifist, very much so, but just thinking about this made me download a computer version of Risk, and waste several hours on it, because I’m a time-wasting idiot. I guess it was my hunter/gatherer/world conqueror coming out.

I do like Risk though.

I’d like to contribute something to human rights/social justice at some point in my life – the recent Mark Thomas show and book inspired me to believe that I can, but it also dawned on me, there’s so much I don’t know. So, to educate myself, I thought I’d start here.

I found these map games/learning tools, which are great – I hope to learn a little bit from it every day.