Some Fun with Numbers and Histories

I had to go back and look up my other posts from Central America, South-East Asia, and Rome (Syracuse, actually) to be reminded about this section of these things---long travelogue post collections. So...here we go.

Where are we?

Germany

Area: 357k sq. km

Population: 83.5 million

Think about it like: Slightly smaller than Montana with the combined populations of California, Texas, and Pennsylvania

Belgium

Area: 30.7k sq. km

Population: 11.9 million

Think about it like: Slightly bigger than Maryland with the population of Ohio

Netherlands

Area: 41.9k sq. km

Population: 18 million

Think about it like: Larger than Maryland, but smaller than West Virginia with the population of nearly New York

Germany is not identified as one of the Low Countries, but it's influence over the region is rich. I don't really want to go into a deep dive on the histories, only to describe a few of the details I learned on this trip.

When Caesar took Gaul, he divvied the northern regions up into a separate partition called Gaulish Belgica. The region became known as the "Low Countries" because much of the northern lands remain under sea level, having been reclaimed from the sea through years of pumping out sea water and building elaborate dykes.

Later, Napoleon recognized the differences between the Dutch people in his Belgica region and split them up, the impetus for what we have today as the Kingdom of the Netherlands and the Kingdom of Belgium. Some of the basis for the split was religious: the northern Dutch were Protestant, while the southern Dutch were Catholic.

Belgium today is the amalgam of weirdo French (Walloons) and conservative, Catholic Dutch. It's an uneasy alliance, that is routinely ready to split the country, with the Flemish part desiring to possibly return to the Netherlands, while the French looking side-eyed at the Wallonia region.

An oversimplification, but here we are...