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[fajrdrako]

The countries of Europe I have been to. I ticked off the squares, looked at the map, and noticed a funny Switzerland-shaped hole in the middle of things. Funny, thought I, I've been to Switzerland. I loved it. Hastily went back and added a tick where I'd missed it.

The places I most want to visit, that I've never been to? Greece. Cyprus. And places that aren't countries, but are parts of countries: Crete. Sicily. Sardinia. Iceland. Finland. The Isle of Man. The Shetland Isles. Denmark. Finland. Bornholm. Jersey. Guernsey. Northern Ireland. Heck, I want to go everywhere in Europe! And can you tell I have a love of islands?

And don't I wish I had a time machine, too.




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Now, this map is misleading because it makes it look as if I have been, say, to all of Germany, while I've only been to Stuttgart (not counting overnight in Frankfurt).

Comments

[silverwhistle.livejournal.com]

create your personalized map of europe (http://www.world66.com/myworld66/visitedEurope)
or check out our Barcelona travel guide (http://www.world66.com/europe/spain/catalonia/barcelona)

This is mine: but I should say that I've only had brief stops to change planes in Riga, Stockholm, Copenhagen, Helsinki and Amsterdam. I visited Belfast one, Strasbourg twice, Monferrato once (not the rest of Italy!), and Russia about 8 or 9 times, with Georgia once. I live in Scotland, and have lived in England.

[fajrdrako.livejournal.com]

Interesting contrasts and overlaps between us. I have been to the Dublin area (County Meath) but not, I am sorry to say, to Northern Ireland, which I would like to say - my ancestors came from the Belfast area. (Ballymacheramerie, County Down). It was a long time ago, it isn't as if I'd have relatives, but... it would still be nice to see.

I've seen none of Russia or Eastern Europe, though I'd like to - but I'm much less familiar with the history and languages there.

I've been to many Italian cities, all of them north of Rome. My favourite was probably Assisi, or Venice, and I loved Torcello... well, I loved everything I saw in Italy. And it has lots of historical connections for me - not just Conrad de Montferrat and Caffaro di Caschifellone, but Shelly and Byron and Julius Caesar and Catullus and Dante and all those Renaissance people.

[silverwhistle.livejournal.com]

I've been as far as Nizhnii Novgorod on the Volga, also up north in Russian Karelia. For 3 summers I did a bit of vacation work as a guest lecturer on Moscow-P'burg river cruises. Stops included Petrozavodsk, Kizhi, Yaroslavl', Kostroma, Uglich...

One of my great-great-grandfathers came from the Ballymena area in Antrim, and a great-great-grandmother from Kiltimagh in Mayo, but it doesn't mean a great deal to me. I find genealogy interesting, but I don't feel any great emotional attachment to any of it. Not the great love that I have for people I'm not related to.

[fajrdrako.livejournal.com]

I have English and Welsh ancestors too, and that means nothing much to me. My interest in the Scots and Irish sides of the family mostly comes from the fact that my mother had interesting stories about them - family legends, oral tradition. She used to talk about how the family came from Ballymacheramerie, County Down, and I couldn't find it on any map I had, and pretty much decided it was untrue - when a fried of mine from Belfast, a cartographer himself, showed me a map with Ballymacheramerie on it. (A very tiny place!) Since then, I have had more faith in the oral tradition of my mother's family. Perhaps slightly less in the notion that one of our ancestors was a changeling.

[silverwhistle.livejournal.com]

Most of the stories came from my father's side of the family (Scots, plus the Ballymena guy). Due to her grandparents dying early, my mother knew very little of her family. I've supplied most of the information for her from my researches! It's interesting (and one line goes back to the first Bishop of Durham in early 11C), but I don't have any real emotional investment in the characters, apart from the MacLeod great-x-n-uncle, who seems to have been commissioned by Pattie in a Loyal North Carolina militia regiment, and returned to Scotland after being tortured by the Rebels: and that's on Pattie's account. One of my paternal great-great-grandfathers was in the Australian gold-rush in the 1850s, and a maternal great-great-great-grand-aunt, Jemima Poppy, was an educational missionary in Malaya and China in mid-19C.

[fajrdrako.livejournal.com]

It sounds to me as if you know a lot more about your family than I do about mine! I feel more connection to my Crusaders and other historical places and people ... but all the same, I would rather like to see Ballymacheramerie.

[silverwhistle.livejournal.com]

Yes, I've been doing genealogy for years!

I think the thing is, most of them in the past 3 centuries are agricultural or urban labourers, industrial workers or artisans/craftsmen - hat-makers, stonemasons, herring-dealers (one maternal great-great-great-grandfather stuffed birds - don't tell the budgies!). I've always regarded myself as a slightly more glamorous creature, and, well... there's not all that much that's exciting there. The Ughtred line stopped being landed gentry over 300 years ago and ended up as illiterate and frequently illegitimate labourers on what had been their own properties.

I suppose a lot of the historical characters I adopt are more the sort of people I wish I were related to.

[fajrdrako.livejournal.com]

I suppose a lot of the historical characters I adopt are more the sort of people I wish I were related to.

There's some truth in that - I wish I'd been one of the Montferrat relatives. But for most of the poeple I admire historically.... well, Plantagenets tended to have difficult lives and even more difficult deaths; Julius Caesar's family died young or was killed - I always feel terrible about Caesarion. Some of the Lusignans managed all right. But only some.

[wijsgeer.livejournal.com]

Most of it with my parents BTW. I am not a traveler.



create your personalized map of europe (http://www.world66.com/myworld66/visitedEurope)

[fajrdrako.livejournal.com]

Well - you've covered more of the European map than I have - Turkey is impressive, to a Dunnett fan! Now, you do have a slightly unfair advantage, in that you don't have to cross the Atlantic - I am envious. Not that there's anything wrong with crossing the Atlantic, except that it takes a while and it is very, very expensive.

[wijsgeer.livejournal.com]

As I said, I am not much of a traveler, I just tow along with my parents. Is asked my father to fill in the world map and it was covered in impressive red. He "scores" around a 100 countries, all of Africa, almost all of Asia. Only Middle/South America and Oceanie are lacking. (He did travel both for fun and work.)

My 'world-map'



create your own visited country map (http://www.world66.com/myworld66)

[silverwhistle.livejournal.com]

If I gave this to my father, he'd probably colour everywhere that has a coastline! He was a radio officer in the Merchant Navy as a young man!

[fajrdrako.livejournal.com]

That would be a well-coloured map!

[fajrdrako.livejournal.com]

You've been to Pakistan? That's pretty cool - it's on my list of "places I really want to visit" because of Mohenjo-Daro.

Am I right in guessing that you haven't been to Alaska, it's just that if you've been to any part of the U.S., the map fills in the whole thing?

[wijsgeer.livejournal.com]

You've been to Pakistan? That's pretty cool - it's on my list of "places I really want to visit" because of Mohenjo-Daro.

my father spend much of his time in Pakistan for bussines reasons. So one year he brought his family along, I was 11 and my sister 9. It was my first and most shocking confrontation with a real different society. The difference between people were so much bigger than in the Netherlands, the difference between rich and poor (we spend time with middle and upper class), the difference between man and woman (the women we saw lived in a kind of purdah, the 14 year old daughter of my father's bussines friend only had as entertainment the weddings of her girlfriends. Also, it was a way more violent society, along the road you saw soldiers with their machine guns and people we visited lived in compounds defended by heavily armed security.
This is not to say the people we met were not extremely friendly and hospitable, they did their best to make us at home as possible. But at times they must have found us strange indeed.
I don't think it is an easy country to travel trough alone as a woman, it is violent and rather, well I won't say misyogynist, but it has a very different idea about what a woman can and may do.
After our trip I did a presentation about Pakistan in my elementary school. Afterwards I heard that one of my classmates had asked her parents to go to Pakistan for the holidays.

About the US, yes, 1 state counts like the whole. I've visited several states on the east coast, I know for certain I visited New York city, Washington DC, the state of Maine, Maryland, maybe 1 more. An other fun trip where the differences between the Netherlands and the US seemed more prominent than the similarities.

[fajrdrako.livejournal.com]

Pakistan ... was my first and most shocking confrontation with a real different society.

Yes. I think it would be amazing. If/when I go to Pakistan, I wouldn't want to go alone - and of course my main interest is in seeing what remains of a culture 2500 years old. (Not much.) I'm sure I would be horrified by the sequested lives of the women - I've read about it, and find it difficult to imagine. Also the level of violence, so many people owning guns.

There are many superficial resemblances between Canada and the U.S. but it's always the differences I notice when I go there. The level of crime and fear is one of the differences.