Fun with Flags

Ever since my political science course in college, where I was assigned them for study, I have loved geography quizzes. If I’ve brushed up recently, you can give me a blank map of the world and I’ll be able to fill in all 194+ countries (if I haven’t brushed up, I’ll get all the Caribbean islands wrong except Jamaica).

I enjoy studying flags, too. I started with a trivia game on my phone, then mastered the skill online—the flag quizzes are a new feature on the website I already used for geography. It’s always seemed to me that most flags are just variations of the three-stripe theme, but really there are many with much more interesting designs. Kazakhstan is my favorite:

But these others are close behind.

Albania

Macau

Somalia

Georgia

Afghanistan

Barbados

I particularly love the story behind this flag, which was adopted when Barbados became independent in 1966. The old colonial flag had shown Britannia holding a trident; the “broken trident” here symbolizes the break from their status as a colony.

Bhutan

Brunei

Egypt

Seychelles

Hong Kong

Norfolk Island (part of Australia)

Papua New Guinea

Saudi Arabia

Cambodia

Vatican City

I spent all my free minutes at work one night on the CIA Factbook website, looking through flags and finding the ones I remembered from my quizzes. Is this the nerdiest thing I’ve done in my entire life? I think it is. I am legitimately having so much fun learning about flags. I told my husband and he said, “There’s a YouTube channel you should watch . . .”