What countries (or other topics) are there that you feel like you ought to know more about than you do know?
For some reason I got to thinking about Portugal. Portugal is by no means an obscure country. If I had a map of Europe I absolutely guarantee I could find Portugal on it. It’s super easy! And if someone asked me to list all the countries in Europe, there’s no way I would leave off Portugal. But I realized that the number of actual things I know about Portugal is TINY, at least compared to nearly every nearby country.
-Its capital is Lisbon
-Lots of Catholics
-Very involved in early exploration and colonization, which is why they speak Portuguese in Brazil
-Henry the Navigator was from there
-It’s a member of the EU and uses the Euro (admittedly that’s just a guess)
-Very good international soccer team recently, starring Christiano Ronaldo
I think that may literally be it. I can not think of ANY other fact about Portugal. I can not name any other city in Portugal. I can not name any other important person from Portuguese history. I can not think of famous stories or events, real or fictional, that happened in Portugal.
I think Portugal has the highest ratio of “how much I kind of feel like I know about it” to “how much I actually know about it” of any nation in the world.
You might know some of these but just did not remember:
Magalhaes (Magellan) was Portuguese
The “early exploration and colonization” has more to do with Goa and Macao, which are to the other side (India and China respectively)
Famous linens and towels, beautiful tilecraft (often creating large pictures out of individually-painted tiles).
Ever heard of Port wine? It’s from Oporto.
Border with Spain.
Has several islands waaaaay over there in the Atlantic (Azores, Madeira - Ronaldo is from Madeira).
Canada – and I’ve even been there twice. I don’t know the history after say 1762 and even though some speak the same language it just feels more foreign to me than Germany does. Or the Georgia Republic for that matter.
Don’t feel bad. Although Canada is a large country, we have a relatively small population (1/10th of the USA) and aren’t huge on the world scene.
Canadians lap up US culture through TV, movies, news reports, music, and the list goes on. We like flying under the radar.
I’ve been to Mexico a couple of times and I’m embarrassed to admit that I couldn’t tell you who the current president is, and I’d bet 95% of Canadians couldn’t either.
That could be where some of the “strange-ness” comes from. A bunch of us rollercoaster nuts who did a trip through Canada a couple summers back described it as somewhat like a Twilight Zone episode where things were ------ just not quite right. You go somewhere with a different language and you expect differences. You go someplace using the same language and with the same basic shops and all but with subtle differences and its just odd.
I wonder – do some of your Canadians react the same when they visit south?
Nice chocolates, Austin Powers’s nemesis’s dad came from there, the capital is Brussels, European Parliament is there for half the week, it’s expensive, it’s former queen Fabiola (what a fab name), the widow of 1951-93 King Baudouin (wot?), died recently, Belgians speak three languages.
I think one difference between Belgium and Portugal is that Belgium was smack dab in the middle of both world wars, and a fair percentage of what I know about recent European history relates to them.
There’s a satirical news podcast called The Onion that I listen to, hosted by Jon Oliver and a British comedian named Andy Zaltzman. They have a running joke that whenever Belgium comes up, they pretend that the only thing they know about Belgium is the waffles. The point being, Belgium DOES come up in the news often enough that it’s worth having a runnning joke about.
Right. But because it’s small you EXPECT to know nothing about Liechtenstein. Whereas Portugal is NOT small, has been a major world power at some points, and I still know almost nothing about it.
Portugal makes a lot of cork and has a super-long (maybe the world’s longest) alliance with Britain. Belgium has good mussels and you can buy escargot on the street.
Portugal has the world’s oldest alliance, going back to the 14th century—with England, originally, and then the UK as the successor state of England.
The southernmost slice of Portugal, a strip about 20 miles wide, is called the Algarve—from Arabic الغرب al-gharb ‘the west’—because it’s all the way to the west in the Iberian setting. Weird thing is how it remained a separate kingdom from Portugal all the way to the end of the Portuguese monarchy in the 20th century. It had exactly the same government of Portugal all along, and there was no real difference, but for some strange reason they maintained the legal fiction that it was a different kingdom. In fact, its name was pluralized as the “Algarves,” counting Portugal’s colonies in Morocco as the other Algarve, and the name officially stayed plural long after Portugal lost all of those Moroccan colonies.
And some of it is wrong. Welsh is a Celtic language, but it is not a Gaelic language. The only Gaelic languages are Irish Gaelic (Irish), Scottish Gaelic (Gaelic), and Manx Gaelic (Manx).
I’ve been to a couple of NASCAR races (my sister lives in Atlanta). I’ve been to the Baltimore Grand Prix a couple of times. But I don’t know anything about racing that I didn’t learn from Days of Thunder or, more recently, Rush.
