The Insane Coffee Project

Facts can be like melodies. You don’t care for some of them, but it’s near impossible to avoid them. Some facts get stuck in your head. You just like them. They gel with you and you don’t know why. Let’s call them fun facts.

The simile has its limits though. Luckily for us, our minds do not keep going over and over and over these facts, as they are want to do with sticky melodies. They’re squirelled away in some drawer of our minds, from where, on some random Tuesday mid-morning, apropos of nothing, we’ll take one out to turn over in our hands for a bit before putting it away again. It registers on our faces as the slightest of half-smiles. I used to spot it every once in a while on public transport, in the days before peoples’ necks gave out and they were reduced to staring into their smart phones.

Anyway, I have two such fun facts I’d like to share with you today. The hope is that this double-whammy might induce a full smile in one or two of you. They are certified pub quiz worthy facts. I first made their acquaintance in a Sunday night pub quiz at Charlie P’s in Vienna.

They are both questions of geography. I wasn’t crazy about the subject at school, but that’s probably not saying much. I’ve always enjoyed a good map and that is by no stretch a weird or unusual thing. I recall the delight with which we all pounced on Google Earth when that first came out.

So without further ado, here is the first question: Which two capital cities are in closest proximity to one another? (Washington D.C. and Mexico City are about one thousand, eight hundred ninety miles apart, so it’s not those two.)

We have to go over two definitions before tackling the second question. A landlocked country is one that has no borders with the ocean, but is completely surrounded by land, by other countries in other words. For example, no country in North or Central America qualifies. An example of a landlocked country is Nepal. It has no coast guard, no ports. It’s surrounded by India and China. There is a grand total of two countries that take this idea to the next level. These are so-called doubly landlocked countries. They are surrounded by countries that are themselves landlocked countries, hence, doubly landlocked. Which two countries are they?

Like many questions of geography, you may think they’re just for shits and giggles, especially if they’re being asked in a pub quiz, but they do have real life consequences. The case of being landlocked is the more obvious, as you are at a clear disadvantage when it comes to trade. Everything going over-land is just much more expensive to transport than going by sea, nevermind air. And you are even more dependant on having good relations with your neighbours than countries with seaports are. Having good relations is of course preferable for many reasons, but history shows that that is not always how the cookie crumbles. The answer to the first question is Vienna and Bratislava, the capitals of Austria and Slovakia, which are separated by about fifty-five kilometers.

Cudos at this point to the nice Irish lady who put together the quizes at Charlie P’s for picking a fun fact, one half of the answer to which was the very city we were all sitting in at that moment, making you feel extra dumb if you didn’t figure that one out. (Our team got it of course.) I’ve forgotten her name, perhaps I never even knew it. And come to think of it, she might’ve been Bosnian… So much for my ear being attuned to the subtleties of accents. (Perhaps she was Bosnian, but had been working at Charlie P’s for so long, or had learnt most of her English in there, that she had a true hybrid going on, in which case, cudos to the acuity of my accent ear.) The two doubly landlocked countries are Liechtenstein and Uzbekistan. The former is surrounded by Austria and Switzerland, and the latter by Tajikistan, Afghanistan, Turkmenistan, Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan.

Those are two quite different countries! In almost any way that you can think of. I wonder whether their being doubly landlocked is the only thing they have in common, apart from both being situated on planet Earth, and being constructs, stories really, that us bipedal, naked apes have told ourselves and bought into. (Nod here to Yuval Harari.)

The post got a bit longer than I thought it would, but in this way I hope the questions themselves and especially the answers are well enough hidden from a quick scan across the text.

Wishing you a nice day and week!