Wednesday 13 May 2015

Countries visited

When I was about 9 or 10 I decided I wanted to visit one country for each year that I lived. Which may have started because I counted all the countries I had visited so far, and it came up to exactly the age I was. Or I may have read about it in a book (think about what a great short story that would make; someone has to visit a new country for each year that they live, and what could go wrong...).
Anyway, the recent trip to China got me thinking about this again, so I decided to make a list of all the countries I have visited so far, in somewhat chronological order (I really can't tell if I visited Germany before Belgium, or Luxembourg before France... My parents may have something intelligent to say on this, but really, who cares?), to see whether my goal from two thirds of my life away still holds. I've only included countries that I actually spent at least one night in (otherwise I could include Oman or Abu Dhabi due to flight transfers, or Slovenia and Croatia as I trained through them, although that was on a sleeper train), unless they are really small countries one usually doesn't actually spend a night in (Vatican City and Andorra).
So here goes:
1 The Netherlands
2 Germany
3 Belgium
4 France
5 Luxembourg
6 England
7 Switzerland
8 Italy
9 Denmark
10 Spain
11 Egypt
12 South Africa
13 Mozambique
14 Malawi
15 Zambia
16 Kenya
17 Tanzania
18 Poland
19 Jordan
20 Sweden
21 Vatican City
22 Hungary
23 Czech Republic
24 Austria
25 Scotland
26 United States of America
27 Andorra
28 Australia
29 China

Wow, who would have thought that would fit exactly? And there may be countries I've missed: I'm not sure whether I've ever visited Monaco or San Marino, but I think this list looks pretty neat.
I still have some countries relatively close by that I really want to visit (Greece, Portugal, Norway, Ireland, Turkey), and loooots of countries further away, so I think I will try to actually keep up the 'one country a year' rule for a while. It gives me just as good an excuse as any to travel more!

No comments:

Post a Comment