50 Fun, Sad And Weird Facts People Decided To Share About Their Countries

Australia has only ever lost 1 war...against the emu's in 1850. They are now our overlords. They are forcing me to write this. Pray for us

New Zealand's Air Force logo is the kiwi, a flightless bird.

Belgium supplied the uranium for the Manhattan Project. It went something like this:

Belgium government-in-exile: "So we hear you guys need this 'uranium' stuff."

US government: "What? No, we don't. And if we did that would be top secret. Seriously, who tf talked?"

Belgium: "Doesn't matter, Congo is one of two uranium deposits in allied hands. We have 1200 tons of the weird glory rock, do you want it?"

US: "Yes, if you can get it to the African coast, we can get it across the Atlantic."

Belgium: "No need, it's already in the US."

US: "It... what?"

Belgium: "It's rare stuff. So when we moved all of our gold, silver, and other valuables here at the start of the war, we included the uranium. It's in a warehouse on Staten Island. Has been for the past four years."

US: "Fuuuuu... Yes, we'll take the lot!".

In New Zealand, we had a leader recently (Jacinda Ardern) who almost everyone else outside NZ loves. Yet there is a proportion of the population who hates Jacinda Ardern with a passion even now, years after she saved a lot of people’s lives and supported businesses during the pandemic. During her leadership she dealt with a mass shooting, a volcanic eruption with loss of life, and a pandemic and did it all exceptionally well.
Yet there is this unfathomable hatred towards her. It’s bizarre.

The Choctaw nation sent $170 to Ireland during the potato famine in the 1840s. This was a huge sum for the Choctaw to collect and send at the time partially because they were having their own crop related issues.

Canada has more freshwater lakes than the rest of the world.

Combined.

There are 195 countries on Earth. There are only four countries that DONT have paid maternity leave: Papua New Guinea, Suriname, Tonga, and THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA. That’s right folks. In America we work until the day we give birth, and we’re right back to work after giving birth. Isn’t that awful!? No other developed nation treats their mothers like this. Germany, Mexico, Japan, Canada, literally every country you can think of, they give their mothers PAID, job protected maternity leave!

We have a unique word "Kalsarikänni": It describes the moment of drinking at home in your underwear. Word was also used by Homer Simpson in one Simpsons episode.

60% of our country would be (re)claimed by the sea if we'd done nothing for the past 500 years about water management. More than half of it exists because human beings are f*****g smart.

Edit: Yes, The Netherlands.

Spain is, in fact, currently a very secular country where the Catholic Church has lost almost all its influence. People enjoy the folklore of religion but do not practice religion actively. Few people under the age of 60 attend mass regularly.

Indian women collectively hold an estimated 24,000 tons of gold, which is more than the combined gold reserves of the top five gold-holding countries.

The last residential school (abducting Indigenous children from their families and putting them in Christian schools where they were a****d, poorly fed, and lost their culture) closed in 1996 in Canada!! This is not ancient history.

A lot of our nutrition knowledge is based on unethical experiments conducted on these children and other Indigenous communities without consent and without any of the ethical procedures that are now in place to protect research subjects.

Australia lost a prime minister. Like literally lost him. Harold Holt went out for a swim at Portsea Beach one day and was never seen again. No body, nothing. Of course there were rumours about a Chinese submarine waiting offshore to whisk him away, but nothing was ever proven. Then Melbourne Council named a swimming pool after him. True story.

Contraception was only legalised in Ireland in 1980. Homosexuality was only decriminalised in 1993. Divorce was only legalised in 1995.

As Americans, we’re taught about slavery, the trail of tears, etc. But I swear we never, or just *barely* were told about how the country treated the Japanese in the 40s and 50s. Terrible stuff. It’s not common knowledge like slavery and indigenous g******e are.

Americans are so dumb that they thought 1/3 was less than a 1/4 and it derailed a whole hamburger campaign in the 1980s. .

We ate our prime minister one time. The Netherlands

Scotland is the only country in the world where Coca-Cola or Coca-Cola made Fanta isn’t the number 1 selling soft drink. It‘s Irn Bru!

We hold the world record for most days without a fully elected government. From December 2018 to October 2020, Belgium had no federal government and was governed by an interim government for 652 days, beating the previous world record holder (541 days), which was… Belgium.

Canada has a strategic maple syrup reserve.