Thursday, May 21, 2009

How small is small?

There are lots of way to measure the size of a country, and by most of them Belgium is pretty small. In area it's a little smaller than Maryland, but it may not look it because it doesn't have either the Chesapeake Bay or that bit that's about 4 feet wide. It has fewer than 11 million people, so it's only a little more populous that New York City--and a lot less populous than the New York metro area. But my favorite way to tell how small it is is the traffic reports. When they give the traffic, they give the traffic for the whole country at once. We always feel like we should understand more of what they're saying, since we speak French, but then we come to our senses and say, "Hey, we don't understand the traffic reports at home, and they're in English!"

1 comment:

travis said...

National traffic. Awesome.

One of my bosses talks about trying to fly into Amsterdam. (I know, it's not in Belgium, but the point holds.) Because of schedule or cost or something, that wasn't going to work, so the travel agent suggested he fly into another city. (The Hague? Rotterdam?) "But that's a whole other city!" he protested. Then he realized that the distance from the other city's airport to Amsterdam was less than the distance between Dulles and BWI.

(And it's not just Donald still reading your blog.)