How do you fill the "Countries Visited Map"?
First published: Wednesday October 4th, 2023
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What countries to count in as visited?
Have you filled the "Coutries Visited Map"? Seeing the countries light up in green is as interesting for oneself as it can be for others.
However, I started to wonder about a few points:
1. Should countries count where I just had a stop-over flight and never left the airport? If yes, I could add three more countries (UAE, Turkey and Greece) to my list.
2. Also, I crossed Slovakia by train on the way to and from Budapest. Again, I didn't actually set foot on the ground, but was not in a closed international area of an airport. Should this count as visited? Maybe it could help, if there was a way to indicate the length of a visit, e.g. by lighter or darker coloring.
3. Talking about quantity in the previous point, the next question is obviously the quality of a visit:
Have you been to a holiday resort just enjoying the beach or did you talk to locals and learn about their culture? Did you work or study abroad? That's probably too much for a two-dimensional map, but certainly would be interesting.
What do you think? How did you fill the map?
I wish there was a way to count it as half, as you can already get a few impressions being, even when it's just a glimpse.
Mine includes United States, Canada, Mexico, Honduras, Belize, Brazil, Russia, Kazakhstan, Germany, Switzerland, Poland, Austria, Spain, Portugal, Romania, Morocco, South Africa, Malaysia, Japan, Singapore, and Australia, and of course, Armenia, my birth country. I don't share your predicament as I have set foot in all of those countries.
UAE sounds delightful, I'd love to go there and to Qatar and Bahrain someday.
Supposedly the malls and food are nice, though. I've never been there.
2. No, otherwise I'd include Belgium
Just curious whether other people would.
Some countries (like Qatar in your case or UAE in my case) probably would be appear as visited much more, if stop-over counted.
But yes, agreeing with Insaniot that you should do something to consider a country visited and just eating there is probably good enough - however, for me personally, I want to leave the airport to feel that I was really there.
As for my opinions, I'll explain with an example. Consider that I am flying to London.
1. If my flight lands at Dubai for a few minutes before continuing on to London, I would say that I have not visited the UAE.
2. If I had to change flights (for which I must deboard my first flight and walk on the airport floor and then board the second flight), I would say that I have visited the UAE. If someone asks me what cities I have been to there, only then I'd specify that I've been to the Dubai airport and not any cities.
3. If I had to stay in the airport for a long period of time (layover or stopover), I'd again say that I have been to the UAE.
For your third point, I think talking to locals isn't really necessary as a defining point for having visited a country.
Those are my opinions and it might differ from you and others. It's your choice, after all.
About the talking to locals: Maybe it is not necessary to count a country as visited, but it serves as an indicator, because it is hard to visit a country for a while and not to talk to locals.
This could mean that if you say ran across a border and back immediately, that by my system it would indeed count.
Although I have been to all of Europe, there are lots of places I haven't seen. I was mostly delivering and collecting and an industrial estate in Moscow looks very similar to an industrial estate in Milan or Manchester. I did however interact with lots of "normal" people and got a pretty good insight into life in those countries.
I've lost count of the amount of times I have been to Venice for example. I used to always try and park nearby. If you ever go there, don't use the restaurants on the main canals, seek out the back street ones that the locals use, much better food and much cheaper prices!
Almost all of this was over 20 years ago, from 1989 to 1999. Some of the forays into Eastern Europe were before the fall of the Berlin Wall and the break up of the USSR.
Btw. are you planning to visit any of the countries where you just stopped, but didn't visit, yet? (For me, I can tell that all the countries, I don't count so far, I hope to really visit in the future.)
Personally, I don't consider airport layovers as visiting a country on my travel map, however they do provide a sort of sample of the country itself. So far I have visited only the airports of three 'countries', India, Hong Kong and Denmark.
The airport in Delhi was interesting, it was a little rough around the edges, but overall I had a smooth transit. Instrumental versions of Bollywood songs were playing in the background, and flying out of Delhi I could see many apartments below in the night.
Hong Kong had so many tall buildings, and lots of security. I can't remember if Hong Kong is its own entity on the Jetpunk map, but I stayed in Mainland China for a month already.
Copenhagen airport gave me a very good impression of Denmark. Everything was clean and much more efficient than most Canadian airports I've been too.
I haven't been to the UAE, yet, but the airports in Dubai and Abu Dhabi gave kind of a preview.