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.

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