Barnorama All Fun In The Barn
A fascinating dive into country facts blending strange traditions and mind-blowing numbers.
“New Zealand’s Air Force logo is the kiwi, a flightless bird.”
“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.
Yes, The Netherlands.”
“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.”
“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”
“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.”
“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.”
“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.”
“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.”
“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!”
“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.”
“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.”
“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.”
“Actually right now,half a million people in Serbian capital are fighting against the f*****t regime which is using tear gas and weapons against their own people in favor of the f*****t s***s,this fight has been going on for 7 months and the government controlled media is trying to silence all of this.”
“Canada has a strategic maple syrup reserve.”
“In Honduras there’s a interesting event that happens every year in a really small town, called “La Lluvia de Peces” (The Rain of Fish), where fish fall from the sky during heavy storms, likely sucked up by waterspouts and dropped on land, leaving locals to collect them for food. There has been some studies and there are several explanations but nothing completely confirmed.”
“The soviet union dropped 450 nukes near my town in Kazakhstan. No one was evacuated and people are still born with deformities and cancer is prevalent.”
“In Australia you are never more than 50m away from a snake. 1 in 3 houses in Brisbane have a resident snake living in the roof.”
“Poland
A bear called Wojtek fought in our army in WW2 and he carried amunition during the battle of Monte Cassino.He also liked to drink beer and smoke(and eat at the same time) cigarets, he had the rank of corporal during his time in the army, he was bought by our soldiers in Syria later lived in Italy and at the end in Scotland where he was put in a zoo where he died in 1963, he never actually visted poland and we have statues of him in diffrent polish cities, his statues are also in Italy and Scotland.”
“The two main islands that make up New Zealand didn’t have official names until 2013.”
“Montenegro declared war on Japan for no good reason. It is half a world away and has the population of a Japanese village.”
“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.”
“Philippines is the only other country besides the Vatican where divorce is illegal. And that’s just one of the many problems we have here.”
“Scotland were world champions in 2004 and 2005 for the sport of ……ELEPHANT POLO.”
“Every year the whole country (UK) gets together with their families to burn an effigy of a dude who almost blew up our parliament 400 years ago. “
“My country has more than half of all the roundabouts in the world, and almost twice as many roundabouts as the second most roundabouty country. And to be honest, I find it a little WTF that other countries don’t have more roundabouts. I find them way more comfortable to navigate than cross intersections or red lights.Edit : That’s France.”
“For 7 years, the prime minister of Serbia was an openly lesbian woman who has a son with her partner, even though gay marriage and adoption for gay couples are illegal in my country. Today, she is the president of the parliament.”
“In Bulgaria we eat macaroni with sugar and feta cheese for breakfast.”
“Moldova has the largest wine cellar in the world that goes for like 200 km (120 miles?) also we have one man in iur country who holds the world record for owning the biggest horse shoe collection (over 12 000), he has his own museum full of all his collections btw, it’s pretty fun there ngl.”
“Poland. We had woman crowned “King” instead of “Queen”. And her husband met diplomats from our country in the baths half-naked to show how civilized he is. We enlisted bear in the military and had him reach quite a high rank in the artillery division.We are a WTF nation in general.”
“In Finland we have a brand of bread called Jussi Pussi.Do what you will with this information.”
“Before invading Spain, napoleon sent a formal letter to the crown along the lines of ‘don’t worry about my armies crossing the border, we are just on our way to Portugal!’. No one suspected anything until he was literally knocking on the gates of our capital.”
“Canada is as tall as it is wide (ish).”
“Ireland used women who had premarital s*x as slave labour for decades.”
“We have both the largest air force in the world (USAF) and the second largest air force (US Navy). This fact has always blown my mind.No affordable healthcare, horrible work/life balance, the government doesn’t even pretend to care about its citizens… but, hey! We’ve got a s**t-ton of military aircraft!”
“In France, you can marry your cousin or a dead person”
“Norway, often mentioned as one of the most well-run countries in the world, runs on caffeine. We drink insane amounts of coffee, and we’re one of the world’s top consumers per capita. But it doesn’t stop there: Pepsi Max is our top-selling soft drink, making us (apparently) the only country where diet soda beats sugary soda. We alone drink over 9% of the world’s Pepsi Max.Clearly, caffeine is the secret to surviving the cold and dark winters.”
“Bulgaria. My country didn’t change its name in 1300 years”
“Norwegians eat more pizza per person than any other country in the world.”
“The United States tried to send all the slaves back to Africa and soon realized it was mathematically impossible, especially given the means of the day. This is how Liberia was founded.”
“Spain. We have free trains”
“Canada: My hometown of Winnipeg is (indirectly) the namesake of Winnie the Pooh and is occasionally colder than the surface of Mars.Also, the “Red Scare” that was prevalent in the US in the late 1940’s and early 1950’s started in Canada with the Gouzenko Affair, when a GRU agent at the Soviet embassy in Ottawa defected and brought with him evidence of a massive Soviet spy ring in North America.”
“The biggest land border France has with another country is with Brasil.”
“We have a town called ‘Wait a while’ or ‘Waimate’ in Māori”
“Brazil (alongside our pals Argentina and Uruguay) k**led off like 90% of the male population of Paraguay during the war in the 19th century. They were on their way to become a local power, and were basically set back to the stone age.Funny personal anecdote: my great-grandfather was Paraguayan; we *infer* he immigrated here shortly after the war (who knows why), but can’t be sure. Some twenty years ago, my aunt went to the Paraguayan consulate at our state’s capital to see if there was anyway we could access his documents without having to travel all the way to Paraguay. The clerk there told her (supposedly in a very rude way) there were no documents left from that time to access; “los brasileros lo han quemado todo”, he said (“the Brazilians burnt everything”). Thankfully that was the last war we took part in (other than WWII).”
“South Africa had its own RuPaul-style drag celebrity named Evita Bezuidenhout who dressed like RuPaul and talked politics like Bill Maher.”
“There are places in romania where its almost fully hungarian speaking. like thise people even refuse to speak romanian despite being in romania and if you speak romanian to them they d pretend they dont speak it (they do).”