Tonight, instead of catching up on sleep, I was playing around on
The True Size Of ... which lets you drag outlines of countries on a world map to see how they compare. All the sizes are apparently accurate and whatever and it gives you a pretty good idea of how these places stack up relatively.
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| South Korea is about the same size as Michigan minus the U.P. |
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| Korea's about the same size as Alabama. Ulleungdo would be Atlanta. |
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| Korea seems a little less than the England portion of the UK |
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| Korea gets dwarfed inside South Africa. I was expecting a little bit more equal size here. Takeaway: SA is way bigger than I expected. |
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| Korea's about half the size of New Zealand's south island |
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| Don't even think about comparing it with Australia. |
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| Jeju is about the size of the island of Oahu in Hawaii |
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| I always wondered if somebody could swim to Jeju. If they can cross the English channel, it looks like they could make it to Jeju, no sweat. |
The takeaway of course isn't how small Korea is, but now amazing it is that this small country (and let's be honest, a single grand metropolitan area with a few satellite industrial cities) can have such a profound impact on the world stage in the 21st century. I hear all the usual expat complaints about how inefficient Koreans are (and I've voiced a few of those myself at some points...) but pound for pound Koreans punch well above their weight in any issue.
UPDATE: I lost track of time looking up a guy who swam the channel, and did a whole lot more. I was going to add something about him here, but screw it, he
deserves his own post.
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