Category: Countries

OP here. I know a circumstance where it’s happened, and why; I was curious whether it was really a one-off. Ludovik Zamenhof, son of a czarist censor, invented Esperanto, and maintained a voluminous international correspondence in Esperanto throughout his life. When WWI started, everyone’s mail in the Russian Empire was subject to censorship, and Zamenhof’s […]

Here’s one that isn’t mine (it’s my friend Suresh’s), but it triggered the question. Japan is the Britain of Asia. Consider: Island nation Never invaded Industrial powerhouse (at least historically) Home of whisky (Suntory, Nikka Whisky Distilling) Belief in its superiority over, well, everyone Emotional constipation. I mean, I defy you to read Jay Liu’s […]

I am Greek. (And Australian, but a lot more of my reactions are going to be informed by being Greek than being Australian, for obvious reasons. In fact, Gallipoli to me is more about the manuscript of Gallipoli dialect I saw in Athens, than the ANZACs. But to me, Australian history started in 1942 anyway.) […]

Just to chime in with Achilleas Vortselas’ answer: I’m not sure Brits know how big a deal it has been for Greeks to embrace a European identity. Or Germans or Spaniards or Poles, but it was a seismic shift for Greeks. Because of that investment, Achilleas is spot on: continental Europeans will feel massively betrayed. […]

Answering as a Greek. The Greek humorist Freddy Germanos (Φρέντυ Γερμανός, Freddie Germanos), God rest him, visited Denmark in the ’60s. This was his take on OP’s question (Ταξίδι στην Δανία, from the collection Το Δις Εξαμαρτείν): The first thing you work out in Scandinavia is that the Danes do not adore the Swedes and […]

Three Finns and a bottle of vodka. They drink in silence for three hours. After three hours, one Finn says: “Nice vodka.” The other Finn says, “Did we come here to talk, or did we come here to drink?!” Mayakovsky was acting like an avantgarde artist (or, as  we call it in my country, an […]

For time depth and sobriety, the first biography I read is still the best: Nixon by Stephen E. Ambrose. The in-depth coverage of his vice-presidency (from an historian who was an Eisenhower fan) explains a lot. Of the others, I wanted to like Fawn M. Brodie‘s Richard Nixon: The Shaping of His Character, but it […]

My experiences when I was actually in Italy did not quite fit the stereotypes. We were embraced by the owners of a Florentine trattoria the way I would have expected in Sicily; and the Passeggiata in Desenzano del Garda was pretty much the volta I remember from my upbringing in Greece.  Taormina, on the other […]

I lived in Irvine from 1999 to 2001, though it doesn’t sound like much has changed since. I was in my late 20s, an urbanite, with no car. It was horrid. Irvine had just gotten Safest City in America status, with zero murders in the past year. After a few months there, I took to […]