National Days

I was just won­der­ing the other day that there were lots of inde­pen­dence days in August. We had ours, they had theirs, and they shouted Merdeka till they were hoarse.

Then a cou­ple of days passed and I thought it was a lit­tle late to talk about things hap­pen­ing in August. But then, for­tu­itously, I looked things up and found out that August and Sep­tem­ber are tied for the most num­ber of inde­pen­dence days at twenty one each! Amaz­ing — the won­der­fully use­ful pieces of infor­ma­tion you find on the net and then feel like you’ve achieved some­thing by find­ing them! Isn’t it? No? I don’t care, I’m going to list them here anyway:

August:

Benin, Switzer­land, Niger, Burk­ina Faso, Bolivia, Jamaica, Sin­ga­pore, Ecuador, Chad, Pak­istan, Bahrain, India, South Korea, Indone­sia, Afghanistan, Ukraine, Uruguay, Moldova, Kyr­gys­tan, Malaysia, Trinidad and Tobago.

Sep­tem­ber:

Uzbek­istan, Viet­nam, Qatar, Swazi­land, Brazil, Mace­do­nia, North Korea, Costa Rica, El Sal­vador, Guatemala, Hon­duras, Nicaragua, Mex­ico, Papua New Guinea, Arme­nia, Belize, Malta, Bul­garia, Mali, Botswana, Tajikistan

If a tie-breaker was needed, I’d give it to August, because the nations of Costa Rica, El Sal­vador, Guatemala, Hon­duras and Nicaragua just hap­pened to be granted inde­pen­dence from Spain on the same day in 1821.

The other inter­est­ing thing in my lit­tle foray into wikipedia was that Israel has an inde­pen­dence day (Yom Ha’atzmaut) that lies between between April 15 and May 15, because it’s based on the Hebrew calendar.

Tech­no­rati Tags: Inde­pen­dence Day, wikipedia