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Top Ten Study Tips

Tim B — Tue, 07 Apr 2009 20:26:34 GMT

***Posted by: Kirk Earl - April 7, 2009

Things I’ve learned from the geography bee

The capital of South Korea is Seoul
I know exactly where my adopted sisters are from.
History and geography are very connected.
Maps can be used in real life, too.
Washington, D.C. is a great place to visit.
Study.
Don’t give up.
If you do what you like best, good things happen.
The experience is worth more than the prizes.
One of the best feelings there is is finally winning at something that you’ve tried very hard for.

Remembering the GeoBee

Tim B — Tue, 07 Apr 2009 20:26:05 GMT

***Posted by Jeff Ready, April 7, 2009

Hello!

I last competed in the National Geography Bee in 1994; the oldest competitors in this year’s Bee were busy being born that year. Despite all the time that has passed since then, I vividly remember the experience of competing. It’s something that’s fun to bring up occasionally, since it was such a fun and unique experience that very few others have ever had the honor to have. You’ll be telling your friends and children about these halcyon days, so appreciate and remember as much as you can.

As soon as I found out that the Bee existed, I was eager to compete in it. I knew growing up that I had a knack for geography, but I didn’t know how my knowledge really stacked up against anyone else’s. Winning the 1993 Maryland Geography Bee was my first confirmation that I really did know geography at a legitimately top level.

My life changed immeasurably at that point. Within minutes I was on the phone with a reporter from my local newspaper. I had never given an interview before, and I had no idea what to say. My picture and its accompanying story were on the front page of the next day’s edition. For the national competition, since I represented Maryland, I had the advantage (or disadvantage) of having the local media follow my whole Bee experience. I was continually being interviewed in the days leading up to, during, and after the national competition.

The point of this is not to bore you with the details of my National Geography Bee experience, since yours will be vastly different. The thing I’d like you to take away from my story is an appreciation for how this will prepare you for the rest of your life. Few kids are interviewed for their local papers or on the morning news. If you’re good and lucky enough to win your state, you’ll certainly have some sort of media attention. You won’t have any time at all to prepare for it; suddenly you’ll be giving interviews. I’m sure you’ll handle it well, and in doing so you’ll put yourself a thousand miles in front of your peers in terms of poise in the spotlight. There are many things that can’t be taught in a classroom, and that’s definitely one of those. When you’re confronted by the business end of a microphone, you’ll be in the extremely small fraction of people that won’t completely panic, and eventually you’ll begin to appreciate how much this means in life.

It’s all really fun when you’re winning, but nobody wins all the time forever. More important than learning how to handle sudden attention is learning how to handle sudden disappointment (and its bitter flavor of attention). After placing ninth in the 1993 National Geography Bee I was expected to make waves at the 1994 Maryland Geography Bee. I could feel the eyes on me as I made it through the preliminary rounds and into the finals. But I missed a pivotal question and placed second. The interviews were few that year, and that lack of attention stung. Some people say that your character is determined more by how you handle failure than by how you handle success. You are probably more familiar with success than failure at this point in your life. Try not to take up residence in failure, but always be a polite guest. Losing the 1993 Maryland Geography Bee was my first of a few visits there, and the experience shaped how I dealt with future disappointments.

I certainly didn’t know it at the time, but I’ve since realized that my National Geography Bee experiences taught me a lot that would serve me well in life. I’m happy to take any questions you have, and hopefully I’ll be allowed to post more blog entries. I promise that my next one will be a bit lighter. Cheers!

Some Helpful Hints!

Tim B — Tue, 31 Mar 2009 15:21:30 GMT

***Posted by: Vikram Modi - March 31, 2009

One of the reasons why the geography bee can be quite challenging is because geography is so interdisciplinary. Simply learning country capitals or the definitions of physical features is not enough: as you know, there are many questions - sometimes whole rounds - about history, culture, economics, natural resources, and other topics that the average person may not associate with "elementary school geography".

However, this can actually work to your advantage. Consider the following question:

In which region of Central Asia, famous for its agricultural output, was Babur, the founder of the Mughal dynasty, born?

What clues are we given? We know we are looking for a region (1) of Central Asia (political geography) (2) famous for its agricultural output (economics, physical geography) that was (3) home to Babur (history). You can get the answer from (3) alone, but my guess is that most Bee participants, maybe even at the national level, would not be able to do this. It would be a mistake to focus on (3) and panic, though, since you can still get the answer from (1) and (2). From (2), you can guess that a river probably runs through the region you are looking for. So now you are most likely looking for a region of Central Asia that is cut by the Amu Darya or Syr Darya. I don't know a whole lot of regions that satisfy these properties, so at this point I would just guess the Fergana Valley (just "Fergana" is also acceptable), which is in fact the correct answer.

Clearly, it is to your advantage to study a broad range of topics. History, culture, and economics questions are fair game! But the key point is that studying a wide range of topics is helpful not just because you will be able to answer a wider range of questions, but also because you increase to probability of answering a single question correctly. Why? As the above question demonstrates, broad knowledge gives you more ways of attacking a question.

The danger of studying a wide range of topics is that you can end up memorizing random facts, which means that you will (1) be less likely to remember them and (2) less likely to recognizes the clues embedded in a question. I think one of the most important things to do when studying is to always make sure you relate facts to each other. Not only do you provide context for each new piece of information, thereby making memorization easier, but you also get in the mindset of looking for many ways to answer the same question.

One way to do this is to make up stories - I often found myself making up stories in my head as I would study. For example, I might have had two countries fighting a war. In determining which cities to attack, I had to think of cities' strategic importance (physical geography), economic importance (economics), and whether there were any similar historical battles from which I could draw inspiration for my story (history, culture). As ridiculous as this might sound, it was actually my most effective studying method by far, even though I wasn't consciusly using it as a studying method.

Another good way to relate facts to each other is to read the news consistently. Events almost always involve so many dimensions that when you read a news article with substantial analysis, you will be able to see how each dimension plays off of the others. The Council on Foreign Relations is an excellent resource - sometimes, they even have interactive maps to illustrate the background behind news stories.

Useful Resources:

The Council on Foreign Relations:http://www.cfr.org/
The Economist:http://www.economist.com/
World Press Review (gives you access to newspapers around the world): http://www.worldpress.org/

Jo napot kivanok, readers! Week 2

Tim B — Mon, 02 Feb 2009 16:43:27 GMT

**Posted by Erik Bolt - February 2, 2009**

Top Ten National Parks – or at least the ones that I have visited, in any country.

1) Staying in the Southwest, here’s one in Utah. Anyone knows about the Grand Canyon, but this other canyon is a bit off the beaten path despite being a gorgeous national park. Here’s a canyon that you can hike to the bottom and back in an afternoon, yet leaves at least as much of an impression as its more famous neighbor to the south. Humanoid rock formations called hoodoos are the big draw here, along with small rock arches and impressive ponderosa pines. Seriously, this is the coolest place I’ve ever been.

2) The second coolest place I have been: nestled in the Tatras Mountains of Slovakia is a forested valley system with areas that have never been settled by human beings. There are also a few monasteries, fortresses, and villages along the edges that allowed the locals to survive invasions by Romans, Mongols, and Germans without jeopardizing the safety of the virgin forests down below. While these are the Low Tatras, the snow-covered High Tatras can be seen to the north on the horizon. This park is home to many small waterfalls, quite a few of which can be climbed through or around thanks to a great system of chains and ladders. Both at the top and bottom of the mountains, this is an amazing place for hiking, and it’s equally amazing how the locals are in such great shape that they can sprint up the steep mountain slopes without getting out of breath. A special attraction on the park’s southern edge is the Dobrsinska Ice Cave.

3) A big system of conjoined national parks, this spectacular area on the border of two Canadian provinces offers a bright turquoise lake, mountain hiking, gigantic glaciers, fossil beds, and the splendid cataract of Takakkaw Falls. High in the Canadian Rockies, this is one of the premier wildlife sites in North America and surpasses its American cousin Yellowstone in every way except for geysers, one of the few cool things it doesn’t have. The Icefields Parkway connecting two of the parks is an especially amazing scenic drive.

4) Another less commonly visited alternative to Yellowstone, this park in Colorado doesn’t beat around the bush in explaining its name. The peaks found on one Colorado license plate and also on the state quarter are found here. Estes Park, on the eastern edge, is one of the least tacky and most authentic tourist towns to grace an American national park.

5) In the southwestern corner of the Florida peninsula, this awesome swamp area looks like something out of the late Jurassic. Alligators and Florida panthers can be found here and are cool in their own right, but it is not at all difficult to also imagine herds of Brachiosaurs grazing among the cycad-like trees that stand above the swamp. Forget the fan-boats; the boardwalks are really the way to see wildlife.

6) A Canadian national park known for its impressive tides, here is a place where visitors hike down fifty feet of iron outdoor stairs to a gravel area and stare up at weird rock pinnacles that are small islands at high tide. Low tide provides neat scenery, while high tide is a chance for some surreal canoeing or kayaking, knowing that just a few hours ago you were fifty feet below the waters you now paddle.

7) Just down the road, relatively speaking, is the American location of Mount Desert Island (the “Desert” is a French word in this case referring to the island’s treeless crown). The mountain in question is Cadillac, the highest point along the Atlantic coast of the Americas all the way from here to Rio de Janeiro. Peregrine falcons are particularly well established here, and nearby Bar Harbor is a delightful small town.

8) A reminder that nature can be found in Europe: southwestern Slovenia is home to karst topography that boasts many massive sinkholes and colossal cave systems. There are two of these cave areas in particular; the one I didn’t visit is Postojna. The one that I did visit is favored by more adventurous and active travelers because it involves more hiking beneath the ground. Here is a monstrous subterranean chamber that one can easily imagine Gandalf and the Balrog facing off inside, and not far away is the exit from the cave into one of the world’s biggest sinkholes, a place big enough to have its own little watershed.

9) A little more conventional but still deserving mention, this huge mountain in Washington State can be seen from downtown Seattle and also from the farming country of the east. Once upon a time it was a volcano; now it’s a popular climb and has prodigious glaciers on its peak. Within the park boundaries lies Box Canyon, where a tribe of large ravens resides.

10) The most visited park in the United States these days has that honor for a very good reason. Nestled on the border of Tennessee and North Carolina, this stretch of the Appalachians offers great swaths of forest that seem perpetually covered in mist and also holds several old villages that shed light on nearly forgotten ways of life from another time.

Jo napot kivanok, readers!

Tim B — Mon, 02 Feb 2009 16:41:58 GMT

**Posted by Erik Bolt - January 21, 2009**

Jo napot kivanok, readers! This week, I thought I’d share three of my geography “Top Ten” lists and discuss why they matter. First, I have compiled the ten coolest cities that I’ve been to, five of them in Europe, five in North America. This list will contain a trivia element, because instead of just listing them, I’m giving you all a challenge of figuring out what they are. All of them are major enough cities that anyone with a background in the National Geographic Bee will know something about each one. That might also be true of my top ten national parks (six American, two Canadian, and two European), but I’ll have the answers available for those. The top ten small towns, however, are by definition less familiar, and while any geographically literate person will have heard of at least two of them, some of them are really obscure.

But why does this all matter? Well, cities are important to understand because, to put it simply, they are where things happen. Depending on exactly what constitutes an urban setting – and that’s something I suspect geographers will always be squabbling over – anywhere from a third to nearly three-quarters of the world’s people live in a city or its environs. Cities are centers of government, trade, science, education, and many of the other great things that define the human race. The ten cities on my list are not the ten largest, or most powerful, cities in the world by any means, but they are all great for their unique cultural and historical settings. Things that have happened in these cities, and other things that continue to happen, make them worth seeing, and each is a precious little slice of humanity that deserves to be recognized.

Important as cities are, the value of small towns cannot be ignored. People have been living in small communities for several millennia, and there are ways in which smaller cities and rural areas seem somehow purer, more in touch with their roots than bigger cities do. Some of these communities are even more distinctive than the great cities of the world. It’s important to recognize that even in an age of globalization and urban growth, a substantial part of the world’s population and land area remains devoted to more traditional ways of life. Rural life is just as much a part of what makes humanity valuable as our great cities are.

Of course, another important use of land is to remind us that we are not alone in the world. Our planet is also blessed with natural wonders that deserve our admiration and preservation. That’s why the greatest places in the natural world are kept safe in national parks, left to the domination of the other thousands of species of living things that we share this world with. One of the things that really got me interested in geography was visiting national parks as a kid, and learning that other countries have them too was one of the coolest things about the Geo Bee.

So, the Top Ten cities I have been to:

1) We’ll start with an easy one: Founded by the Romans as Aquincum in the first century AD, this city today is one of the four European national capitals located on the Danube to start with the letter “B”. The neo-gothic Parliament, St. Istvan’s Basilica, and the Opera House are among dozens of buildings constructed in 1896 for the approximate thousand-year anniversary of the nomadic Magyars at the site of the city. The two halves of the city merged around the time of that millennium celebration, but each today retains a distinctive character – one hilly and especially historical, the other flat and home to the modern side of town. Important museums include the Castle, the National Museum, the Fine Arts Museum, Vajdahunyad Castle – a deliberate conglomeration of every architectural style from early medieval to Bauhaus – and the House of Terror, used by the secret police of both the and the Communist regime and today a memorial to the heroes who resisted both of those foreign oppressors. I lived in this city for three and a half months, and would like to remind you that while one of the city’s halves sounds like the name of a philosopher from northern India, the other does not sound exactly like a word for an annoying person.

2) A little closer to home for Americans but still foreign, this city continues to speak French even though the British defeated the French army at the Plains of Abraham just outside the city. One of the oldest cities in North America, this is a city of narrow cobblestone streets and substantial pedestrian-only areas. A Museum of Civilization, a few impressive cathedrals, and the legendary hotel Chateau Frontenac are among the city’s sites today. While not its largest city, this is the capital of Canada’s largest province and has, at times, been the site of secessionist demonstrations that are considered unlikely to ever wrest the Francophone community away from the country to which it belongs. It’s named after an Algonquin word for “rock”.

3) It’s an exciting time to live in this major American city, with its fastest-rising politician ever now less than a week from being sworn in as the new President of the United States. The Windy City is home to millions of people who live in a rich blend of cultures that – more so than in many other American locales – have not lost their traditions but have made them all the more exuberant. It’s easy to see why this Midwestern metropolis is a place where Europeans like to go on their foreign vacations. Besides tall buildings and the spectacular Millennium Park right in the middle of them, this is a city with great museums. The Field Museum of Natural History, the Shedd Aquarium, the Art Institute, and my father’s place of employment, the Adler Planetarium, are among the most noteworthy. Throw in deep-dish pizza, a successful hockey season for the Blackhawks, a recent starring role in the blockbuster The Dark Knight, elevated trains, an Olympic bid for 2016, and shoreline on the world’s largest single expanse of freshwater*, and the third-largest American city is a great place to be these days.

*Yes, Lake Michigan and Lake Huron are really the same body of water, and it’s bigger than Superior or Victoria!

4) Speaking of Olympics, how about the next city that’s holding them for sure? Surrounded by spectacular forested mountains, this city on Canada’s Pacific coast is home to another splendid mix of cultures from all around the Pacific Rim and beyond. While it does not have as many landmark buildings or world-class museums as most other cities, the city at the mouth of the Fraser River offers amazing opportunities for hiking, skiing, mountain climbing, sailing, whale watching, and trips to the even more spectacular island offshore that shares its name. Orcas, white “spirit” grizzly bears, and reported Sasquatches (probably actually hard-core hockey fans) are among the wildlife that can be seen not far from town.

5) While we’re on an Olympic roll, let’s head back across the Atlantic to a city that has had its work cut out for it ever since the Roman Empire broke up with this city right on the political fault line. Also surrounded by mountains and famed until about fifteen years ago as a ski center, this national capital is said to be the defining location of the twentieth century. World War I began here with a gunshot, and one of the worst examples of genocide culminated in the three-year siege of the city during the breakup of the largest European country to successfully play both sides during the Cold War. During my two days here, I discovered that this city has the appearance of a Middle Eastern city plunked down in the middle of Switzerland (although I have been to neither of those locations and can only conjecture what they look like). Genetically similar peoples separated by their religious allegiances used to share the city and its surrounding territory peacefully, but although peace has been restored and the city is being rebuilt, the scars of the 1990s will take a long time to fully heal. Live land mines can still be found within city limits, but as long as you stay in areas where locals are walking around, you’re safe.

6) Another former Yugoslav capital, this one was known as Emona in Roman times and Laibach under the Austria Empire. Today, the city supposedly founded by Jason and the Argonauts is a wonderfully laid-back place that pulls off a small-town feel despite being a teeming metropolis. There’s a well-restored castle overlooking the riverside district neighborhood of outdoor coffee shops and seafood restaurants. Like the country it governs, this city holds a nice mixture of Italian, Germanic, and Slavic cultural influences. The Triple Bridge, the Cobbler’s Bridge, and the statue-adorned Dragon Bridge all cross the small, thoroughly concrete-contained river in the heart of downtown – and each of these is less than forty feet long. From the innovative world-class youth hostel built inside a former prison to the old Roman forum, this is one of the few urban centers of its size where everything is within walking distance from everything else. Or at least so it seems.

7) Also a very walkable city despite having a huge downtown, the westernmost major city in the area misleadingly labeled “Eastern Europe” is an immense tourist destination. But unlike some other sites that have been swamped and strangled by hordes of visitors, this Bohemian capital seems capable of surviving anything. My first experience of the Golden City came on a Thursday night in November when almost nobody outside of my own student group was out wandering the Old Town, and the atmosphere we felt there was an amazing experience. Major landmarks include St. Vitus Cathedral, the Charles Bridge (Karlovy Most), the Tyn Church, and the Castle high up on the hill. Further out, a visit to see local football (“soccer”) team Slavia in action is well worth it and a great way to exchange crowds of silly drunken foreign tourists for crowds of chanting drunken local fans. When not overrun by tourists, the elegant cobblestone lanes of the older parts of town are a window into the past and a popular filming location for historical movies.

8) And now for something completely different. Many people who haven’t been here think of this city as dreadfully generic, perhaps because it is pretty much right smack in the middle of the contiguous United States. But in fact, this large city on the border of two US states – one of whom it took its name from even though it’s mostly located in the other one – is a lively and highly cultured city that refuses to believe it’s in the Midwest at all. Sometimes called the easternmost western American city, the home of the Royals and Chiefs is still a place where “everything’s up to date…they’ve gone about as far as they can go!” In fact, the city has more fountains than anywhere else in the world except for Rome. Statues also abound in the suburban areas, with one decorating seemingly every major intersection. There’s a fine pedestrian shopping area near the Missouri River and an art museum as good as any. Plus, here is the general area where wagon trains used to set off on the Oregon Trail.

9) Moving back to Europe, we find ourselves in another national capital on the Danube whose name starts with the letter “B”. Located at the confluence of the Sava and Danube rivers, this city was founded by ancient Celts and ruled by the Romans as Singidunum. For the last thousand years or so, its name has meant “White City” in the language of whatever country ruled it, and there have been several of those, including Turkish, German, and Hungarian as well as its own language. Many museums dot the city, one of which commemorates the nation’s greatest individual ever, Nikola Tesla, the inventor and physicist who was recently seen in the film The Prestige. He invented a way to conduct electricity through air over short distances, meaning that you can hold a fluorescent light bulb tube five feet away from his machine and watch it light as the machine begins to run, even though it’s not plugged into anything (yeah, I did it!). Other sites include the home of former national leader Marshal Tito, the world’s largest Eastern Orthodox house of worship, and the unique grounds of the Kalemegdan, a medieval hilltop fortress whose perfectly intact walls now hold a forested, grassy park overlooking the river confluence. While the city has had its share of troubles with NATO bombings and more recent riots that happened just months after I was there, the White City is largely a welcoming and vibrant place that’s worth knowing about.

10) A spectacular Southwestern US state capital, this city is known not for its specific attractions but rather its wealth of Native American and Hispanic cultures. It’s a charming ranch town on the scale of a big city. With a name that means “holy faith”, it’s a safe bet that traditional missions and cathedrals are everywhere in town. Many buildings are made out of adobe brick, or at least convincingly made to look like it. Not far up the road is a companion city known for its annual balloon festival. Also nearby are deserts, rock formations, pueblos, ski areas, and ranches. And unlike some other areas of the Southwest, the fairly high elevation keeps the city, like most of the state, comfortably cool year-round.

Prepare with the Champions! - Erik Bolt

Tim B — Sat, 17 Jan 2009 19:14:12 GMT

Posted by Erik Bolt, January 10, 2009.

Jo napot kívanok*, blog readers,

This spring, it will be seven years since I last won a National Geographic Bee competition, so quite a lot has happened since my direct involvement in the Bee came to a close. For those who don’t know me, I represented Indiana in the 2001 and 2002 NGBs and made a bigger splash in 2006 with another geography competition, the AAA Travel High School Challenge, which tragically is no longer running. I’m a junior in college now, and no, I’m not a geography major, but once the pursuit of geography takes hold of you, it never lets go. My major instead is Classical Studies, in which I study the complete package of Greco-Roman civilization – the study of historical geography is still a substantial part of my life.

Geography is important to anyone who wants to be a responsible citizen and steward of the world we live in, because knowing about the locations and histories of other cultures and countries is essential to understanding the people who live in them. Of course, anyone who has won a state Geographic Bee and gone to the nationals knows more than the basic information about each country in the world; we probably know not only their names, locations, and capitals, but also their mountain ranges and rivers, their ethnic groups and languages, and the important events that have shaped them. But sometimes, geography can seem like a lot of empty trivia if we forget why it’s worth learning. Every place in the inhabited world, no matter how far away it is or how weird its name sounds, is somewhere where real people live. That may sound obvious, but it comes to mean something more with more experience traveling. When you read about a place in a book, you might think that living there would be a lot like living “here”, just with different scenery. When you actually visit a place and run into people who live there, you get more of a sense of what it would really be like to live there. Probably most of us know that from experience.

Actually living somewhere else, however, is more educational than any amount of studying. That’s why I took my first chance at studying abroad, during the first half of my sophomore year. For three and a half months from late August to mid-December 2007, I lived in Budapest, Hungary, and saw firsthand what living in a very different place is like. Many Americans have been to Budapest on vacation – perhaps quite a few of you reading this blog have been there – but living in the city, week after week, making it into the place you identify with, sinks its teeth into you more than a vacation can. I did not learn to speak Hungarian fluently, but I did learn how to think like a Hungarian, to live like a Hungarian. It’s hard to explain much more clearly than that; cultural immersion is something you have to do. The point is, knowing about geography is good, but experiencing geography firsthand is even better.

So, some little tidbits about Hungary, in descending order of obviousness:
Hungary is in central Europe, between Slovakia, Ukraine, Romania, Serbia, Croatia, Slovenia, and Austria
The capital is Budapest, which formed from the merger of Buda (on the west side of the Danube) and Pest (on the east side). Buda is hilly and Pest is flat
The “s” in “Budapest” is pronounced like a “sh” in English
The Danube, the longest European river outside of Russia, splits Hungary pretty much in half
Hungary was about twice as big as it currently is before World War I. Most of the lost territory is in Romania today. It’s known as Transylvania, but Hungarians traditionally call it Erdely
Hungarians are known as Magyars in their own language, which is called Magyarul. The “gy” is pronounced like the “dg” in “budget” or “fudge”, so it’s more like “mah-jar” than “mag-yar”
Lake Balaton, in the western part of Hungary, is one of the biggest lakes in Europe outside of Russia. It’s surrounded by beaches and spas
Hungarians are ethnically and linguistically separate from all other Europeans except Finns. The Magyars arrived in 895 AD from modern Kazakhstan, and were distantly related to the Huns and the Mongolian tribes
Like in China, Japan, and Korea, a person’s name in Hungary is written with the family name first and the personal name second
The Romans conquered about two-thirds of modern Hungary and founded the city of Aquincum, which later grew into Buda. Some of its ruins can be visited today
Hungarians are among the most pessimistic nations in the world, due to their long history of being conquered and mistreated by Imperial Austria, Nazi Germany, and the USSR
Yet they are also proud of being the country that finally beat back the Turks when they invaded Europe in the late Middle Ages. The town of Eger, in the northeast, has a castle that could be called the Hungarian version of Helm’s Deep, where a small army of villagers fought off a huge army of some of the most technologically advanced soldiers in the world
The symbol of the Hungarian nation is a giant eagle called the turul (pronounced like “tour-rule”), which supposedly stole King Arpad’s sword and dropped it onto the site of modern Buda
Other than the countries surrounding Hungary, the largest population of ethnic Hungarians outside of the country is in the American Midwest, including Indiana, where I’m from. Last names like Molnar, Nagy, and Nemeth are quite common in northern Indiana, and those are the three most common family names in Hungary
Famous Hungarians include Saint Stephen (not the one in the Bible; the Hungarian one was an early medieval king), King Matyas Corvinus (who lived during the Renaissance and founded Hungary’s first university, which is named after him), and the composer Bela Bartok. Additionally, many foreign nineteenth- and early twentieth-century composers made their homes in Budapest

*Literally “have a good day”, the standard Hungarian greeting.

National Geography Awareness Week

Epals Moderator — Wed, 19 Nov 2008 20:42:16 GMT

The next time someone tells you to get lost –go for it! Discover the world! Right now it’s National Geography Awareness Week – a perfect time to start learning about the world. For example, did you know:

China has more English speakers than the United States.
In France, there's a place called Y.
Bird droppings are the chief export of Nauru, an island nation in the Western Pacific.

Geography Awareness Week (GAW) runs from November 16-22, 2008. Each day, learn about a different geography topic.

Monday: Human Geography/Cultures
Tuesday: Physical Geography/Environments
Wednesday Geotechnologies
Thursday Global Hotspots

Check out activities and learn more http://mywonderfulworld.org/gaw.html.

So go ahead – get lost; go jump in a lake; go to Timbuktu. You’ll be glad you did!