Tag: europe

Paris loos

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If there are 9 million bicycles in Beijing (and I’m assured that there are), then there must be almost that many public toilets in Paris.

Seriously:

There are 8.34 public toilets in every square kilometre of Paris.

And like a question about the titles of Alfred Hitchcock movies, this is bound to come up in a pub quiz near you at some point. So remember it.

France in general has a lot of public loos.

Why? Well, there are some good reasons:

French municipalities take a proactive, centralized approach to providing sanitation facilities, considering them essential street furniture and a human right for residents, elderly, and visitors.

And some… er… less good ones:

The proliferation of toilets, including automated toilets and older-style urinals, aims to combat the prevalent issue of public urination, especially in high-density areas.

Nice.

Still, everyone (in France) benefits from the number of local loos, so perhaps it doesn’t really matter why they’re there. Visitors to Paris are 70x times more likely to be able to find a public toilet than someone visiting Ljubljana.

Meanwhile:

As of April 2026, the City of Cape Town, in partnership with the Cape Town Central City Improvement District (CCID) and Streetscapes, operates a targeted public toilet initiative in the CBD, offering nine high-usage mobile toilets.

Nine! (not nine million).

Still far better than Slovenia, mind.

Lots of countries

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There Are 36 Countries Within 1,000km From Just Outside Prague.

So says this post entitled: There Are 36 Countries Within 1,000km From Just Outside Prague.

It’s a bit disappointing that they don’t explain exactly where just outside Prague, but by a little mouse work, I think we’re slightly to the north of the city. Maybe somewhere like Ceska Lipa or Jablonné v Podješt?dí – just south of the intersection of the Polish, Czech and German borders.

Interestingly, they don’t actually include Czechia in those 36, so I’ve been doing some rudimentary calculations, and I make that 37.

I was wondering if you could add any more in there, but it’s a well constructed circle. Include Estonia, you’ll lose Albania and North Macedonia. And the UK and Norway are only hanging on by a pixel or two, so you can’t head any further south or east.

The post asks if there’s anywhere else in the world where you could get more countries inside a circle measuring 3 and a bit million square kilometres, but of course, there isn’t, because Europe is small (and Africa is far away).

Cross

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More map trivia to ensure that you have the best chance of winning your next pub quiz.
We came third in one last night. Should have listened to ourselves on all the correct answers we changed.

We’ll learn.

And now, so will you. Behold:

Couple of issues with this one. The use of Istanbul does at least mean it’s in Europe, but it’s certainly not a capital city. And why is Copenhagen hiding behind a “not disclosed” tag?

That’s very suspicious.

Here in Africa, we measure these sort of things in actual zebras, because they’re all over the place down here. And they’re really good at getting in the way of cars.

Paris: 119 times more zebra crossings per square kilometre than Chisinau. Which explains a lot about why pedestrians in Chisinau keep getting knocked moldova.

I’m so sorry.

Where is Yeniköy?

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It’s everywhere.

Here’s a map of the most popular places names for countries across Europe:

And it makes for some interesting* reading.

In the UK, it’s Sutton. Sutton means “One from the Southern Homestead”, and aside from the main Sutton just south of London, there are 12 others. But a total of 13 is nothing.

Numbers
43 Steinbachs in Germany.
97 Ivanivkas in Ukraine.
101 Oktyabrsklys in Russia (it means October).
And an incredible 155 Yeniköys in Turkiye.
Good luck with finding the right one on Google Maps. Or indeed, any map.

New Villages
Yeniköy translates as “New Village”, and a quick scoot across Eastern Europe will reveal that everything there seems to be a “New Village”. It’s the most popular place name in 8 other countries as well as Turkiye:
Novo Selo (HR), Satu Nou (RO), Nova Ves (CZ), Nowa Vies (PL), Nova Selo (BiH), Nova Selle (RKS), Novo Selo (SRB) and Neo Chori (GR)

Honourable mentions:
– 5 Castletowns in Ireland (1 in the Isle of Man, too). Literally a town with a castle in each case. No imagination whatsoever.
– 2 places called Nes in the Faroe Islands. They’re about as big as a postage stamp! How do you manage to get 2 places with the same name somewhere that small? Why risk any confusion? It’s no wonder there are so many missed dates there:

She said she’d meet me in the pub in Nes at 7pm.
But she never turned up.

– Loads of mountain-based stuff: 3 Monts in Belgium, 4 Bergs in Sweden, 3 Szolohegys in Hungary.
– 8 Nogueiras in Portugal. All in the far north, because it means “Walnut Tree” and that’s where the walnut trees grow. AND… Orahovo (x3) is the most popular place name in Montenegro. It also means “Walnut Tree” and check out the latitudes of those two places.

You couldn’t make it up. And I didn’t.
– Loads of Saints in Spain, France, Cyprus and Italy. Catholics, ne?
– 3 Erpeldanges in Luxembourg. No idea what it means, but it’s a lovely word, almost certainly made up by Roald Dahl.

I’m now ready for whenever this info comes up in a quiz, but sadly, I also have this very strange feeling that it almost certainly won’t.

* T&Cs apply

Pre-planning

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It’s not long until our trip abroad, and I have been doing plenty of pre-planning (see here and here for examples).

I’m lucky enough to be well used to the odd weekend away and in the week leading up to my trip, I often plan blog posts for the couple of days that I may be out of internet range, writing time or indeed, any sort of inclination. I’ll normally pre-post a couple of short blogs which are carefully constructed (lol – like I ever “carefully construct” anything on here) not to have too much current content in them, simply to ensure that they’re not wildly outdated by the time they pop up.

It might seem like a silly thing, but I feel that there’s some weird value  in keeping this record of a blog post every single day since… ag… whenever it was. Also, there’s no going back once you’ve broken that run. And I’m not prepared to do that just yet.

Anyway, all this preamble is just delaying our arrival at the point of this blog post, which is that I don’t have a couple of days to pre-blog for for this trip: I have 3 weeks.

Yowzer.

And so the plan is this: preserve the precious record by writing and scheduling a few posts now, and augment the overall content when and where possible when away, with exciting missives from Burgundy and correspondence from London. (A better writer would have magically managed some amazing alliteration here. Not me.)
That way, you might get more than you ever bargained for when you log in while I’m away. (Although I know you weren’t bargaining for much.)

If you have anything you think might need blogging, which will work despite having been written a few weeks early and which fits the overall character of 6000 miles…, you’re more than welcome to get in touch.