I am leaving on a 10-day vacation tomorrow. I am going to Portugal, the country where I was born and lived in until my mid-teens. All my family is there -- even my parents returned from the US a couple of years ago.

I am including this map for your convenience and enlightenment, because my experience has been that not everyone knows where the hell Portugal is. So look in the lower left corner and you will find it right next to Spain. 

When I first started living abroad it used to bother me that people didn't have any idea where my home country is. In the US I got a lot of sweetly blank smiles when I answered the question of where I am from. Some people, though, didn't try to mask their ignorance with beaming expressions, and were quite shameless about it: "Ohhh, next to Ecuador, right?"

Now I am quite used to it -- not only because I don't really have such a strong connection to Portugal anymore, but also because I have realized people are bad at geography all over the world. Yes, that's right: I know Europeans love to cite this and that study that says 74% of Americans think Iraq somewhere in the vicinity of Malaysia. But having lived in 2 more European countries besides Portugal, I now know we aren't such  geographical hot shots either. Just a couple of weeks ago during dinner in Japanese restaurant with friends, one Austrian friend wondered whether Japan was a part of China. 

Anyway, if Europeans are going to hold Americans accountable for not knowing where Hungary or Estonia are, then Europeans need to be held accountable for not knowing where Idaho or Wyoming are (which I guarantee you 98% of them would not be able to pin on a map of the US).

I am happy to say once upon a time I knew exactly where every country in the world is, and I even knew the name of each capital city. I had to learn this for a test in a World Politics class in college. Unfortunately, within a few months a great deal of the information had evaporated from my mind.

A lot of educated people will lie, run away, or bluff rather than reveal any flaws in their geographical knowledge. It has become an area of hypocrisy and almost a litmus test for political correctness. So, here's a full and unashamed disclosure of my current geographical deficiencies:

-- I don't know the north to south order of central American countries: is it Nicaragua, Honduras, El Salvador or Honduras, El Salvador, Nicaragua? I don't have a clue.

-- Except for Afghanistan, I am not really sure how the other stans (Tajikistan, Uzbekistan, Kazhakistan, etc.) next to it are arranged. And by the way, the people in this region seem to be incredibly unimaginative with the endings of their countries' names.

-- Except for the countries of North Africa, a few major countries around the coasts, and South Africa, I don't really know where to place a lot of the inland African countries.

And frankly I have more important things to worry about.