A Quick Post About Belgium Vs. Virginia

Ine and I were sitting around the other night and we were talking about how a friend of mine didn't know where Belgium was, so we had looked at a map to find it and she remarked about how small it was.  I asked Ine if she knew the actual geographic size of Belgium, and she said she didn't.  So we decided to look it up.  Then we looked up Virginia's actual size.  Then we discussed the population of each one.  Here's what we discovered:

Belgium: 11,787 square miles
Virginia: 42,774 square miles

Belgium: 11.2 million people
Virginia: 8.2 million people

So Belgium has crammed 3 million more people into one quarter the geographic space we have in Virginia!

We talked about an exchange student from Germany my family hosted in the 90's and how we drove to my grandparents' house, which took about 9 hours and how that girl said she could have been in 4 different countries in that amount of time, and Ine laughed and agreed that was true.  On that drive, we only crossed into one other state!

Before Ine arrived, I read that Belgium has the worst traffic in Europe.  You can read the article here.  Here in the greater Washington DC area, we have the worst congestion in the US.  You can read the article here. 

Yesterday was a big day in Belgium as a new government coalition was formed.  You can read about it here.  It took them 4 months to form a government.  I remarked to Ine, "Oh, that seems like it took quite a long time!" and she told me that it isn't that long for Belgian politics.  And indeed, according to the article, it took a year and a half to form the previous government!  So I guess 4 months isn't that bad.  By contrast, our only recent example, Bush vs. Gore in 2000, took only about a month to be resolved.