Broken Area

Genetics

Music "Today" by Dan Brodbeck and Corey Thompson

Here we go again!

Music "Beer Rights" by Battery Life

Everybody out there welcome Maddie to the show.

Here is episode 113 we discussed Mongolia, a central Asian country Mongolia is probably best known as the home of Genghis Khan. Good times....

Mongolia has a fascinating recent history too. They were a communist client state of the Soviet Union, and they became a much more democratic country after a non violent revolution in 1990.

Mongolian is an interesting language it seems. You can see the script above, it looks like vulcan... Then again, in Mongolia itself they use cyrillic rather than the traditional alphabet. It is also one of the few places where people sometimes go only by a single name, which means Bono or Teller would be happy there..

As far as food goes, they eat a lot of meat and dairy products. It seems that their food is not that spicy or even seasoned. Then again, they have been and many still are, nomads.

Culturally Mongolai is known for a two stringed instrument whose name I forget currently, and throat singing.

It seems they are trying to start a tourism industry, which is pretty cool. We made a little fun of their website, but in all seriousness, their English is much stronger than our Mongolian...

Next time we are off to the Czech Republic.

We invited Madeleine to sit in with us in this episode as we talked about Nepal. Nepal is the birthplace of one of the many Buddhas. This got us into a discussion of the idea of enlightenment and what it might mean. Our conclusion, umm, we don’t know.

Nepal is of course the home of the tallest mountain in the world, and apparently people want to climb it and get naked, these people are idiots (clearly Dave is writing these show notes...)

We spoke a bit about the Nepalese culture, which seems to be a multicultural one. Sort of a melding of Indian and Tibetan traditions, which seems cool. One group the Newari are a multicultural ethnicity, which is odd and quite well, almost Canadian, except for their music videos...

Next time it is off to Mongolia!

Where does that title come from? Well you will have to listen to this episode about Macedonia to find out.

Macedonia, to Dave, is an interesting country, whereas Isabelle finds it boring... A landlocked country, Macedonia is one of those countries that used to be part of Yugoslavia. When they gained independence they of course wanted to call themselves Macedonia. This bothered Greece. They figure Macedonia means Philip of Macedon, Alexander the Great, and all of that. Hey Greece, that was like 3000 years ago, get over yourselves.

Dave is pretty sure Greece is acting rather childishly here. The discussion of the naming dispute between Macedonia and Greece led to a discussion of nationalism and people choosing to name themselves what they would like.

Next it is off to Nepal!

Just as how last year we went to a warm spot (Tahiti) in December, this year we are off to Samoa. Don’t confuse it with American Samoa. This is the former Western Samoa, a country of about 290 000 people. Their culture has a rich history of dancing and music (some of which you will hear during the episode).

We talked a bit about the importance of sport in Samoa, where rugby is king. It is interesting that Samoa (along with New Zealand and Fiji) do a war dance of sorts (the Haka) before rugby matches. There are few things cooler, or more intimidating, than seeing a bunch of huge rugby players dancing in unison.

Samoa has a special relationship with New Zealand, but the past, when NZ ran Samoa, is a bit checkered. Well such is often the way with colonialism, even when the intentions were good. Today people often go to New Zealand from Samoa for school or work and send money home.

Their political system is at first blush, a parliamentary democracy like we are used to, except when you look more closely at it you realize that pretty much only village chiefs become MPs.

Next time it is off to Macedonia. See you there!

Well of course the answer is, both are the subject of our podcast, indeed, both are the subject of episode 109 of our podcast.

We started out by talking about Barack Obama, the American President-Elect. We, like most Canadians, are very excited about the prospect of our neighbours to the south having a smart, funny and hopeful president, rather than someone that says ‘Nookyoulerr”. We are not unrealistic about what he can do, but we are hopeful that he will do some good, he is pragmatic, not ideological, and that is important.

We then spoke of Thailand. Of course it was known as Siam for a long time, and it was a country that for a time fought off British and French colonialism by playing the Brits and the French off against each other. This strategy worked until WWII when they threw their hat into the ring with the bad guys.

More recently Thailand has had some troubles because their ex PM hosts a cooking show. Seriously.... Anything that mocks the government and the king is taboo, and hosting a cooking show was apparently fit the bill.

Next time it is off to Samoa!

In our latest trip around the globe we stopped in Venezuela. Like many South American countries it has been the victim of bad government, too much US influence and frankly it shows. Venezuela is an interesting case because their government, run by one Hugo Chavez is (at least in name) trying to fight this stuff. Doubly interesting is the amount of oil they have.

Neither of us are big Chavez fans,(attempting to jail your opposition and shutting down tv stations and newspapers is not that cool) though I guess we see where he is coming from.

Venezuela depends a lot on selling oil. Now the price of oil has dropped a great deal just in the past two weeks, so we figure the global economic crisis will affect Venezuela too. We then got into a discussion of the current economic crisis, be concerned...

Next it is off to Thailand!

Oh, BTW, GO OBAMA!

That clever (?) title comes from the fact that when Isabelle was learning about Portugal from people on Skype they would invariably leave for lunch, and all at the same time. It seems Portugal is a great food culture. Indeed, they have given their name to a type of wine (Port) and they were some of the first Europeans to come to the New World when they travelled to the shores of Newfoundland to look for cod. Of course dried cod is very important in their diet and therefore to their culture.

We talked a little about the history of Portugal, it seems like it has gotten forgotten on the Iberian peninsula what with Spain sitting right beside it, sort of like a Canada - USA relationship maybe.

Portugal’s history is pretty rich too. The Moors, the Brits, the Spaniards, Napoleon and a bunch of fascists all had their hands on the country in the past 1500 years. The cool thing was the military overthrew the fascists back in the 70s and now Portugal is a good ol liberal democracy.

(I apologize for not getting this one up sooner, we hope to get more eps out in a more timely fashion in the future, this is all my fault as I am a weenie, obviously this is Dave typing here).

Portugal is unranked by the IIHF.

Next time it is off to Venezuela, that should be fun, what with Hugo and all.