Conveniently Remote

Although I think there is a lot more to geographic education than learning place names, I have been trying for the past year or two to master place names, often using geography games to help me during otherwise idle minutes. It is much easier to remember the basic facts about a place, however, if stories about the place are known. 

My friends at geography.about.com are very helpful in this regard, as they are geography completists, striving to include every place they can in their guide to the discipline. During the summer, for example, I noticed an interesting article about the principality of Andorra (capital: Andorra la Vella), a tiny country with a population smaller than our neighboring city of Brockton.

I drew on Amanda Birney's article about Andorra to write a short post on the Wiley GeoDiscoveries blog, explaining how Andorra is a sovereign nation whose sovereigns (plural) are not residents, and why the chances of finding an Andorran at random in Andorra are not as good as getting the 00 on a roulette wheel.