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Comment by na85 | Hacker News Reader

My spouse had family from Holland come visit us. They told us they wanted to see Niagara Falls and the Rockies. When we explained it would take a week to drive from Niagara to the Rockies they boggled. It's hard to conceptualize just how vast Canada is when back home you can drive for an hour and pass through three different countries.

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What I've found useful to convey the relative sizes of countries is to use a website that allows dragging country outlines to somewhere more familiar [0]. That way it's easier to say that driving from one end of the country to another in a few hours isn't really doable because it's the same size as California or the distance from Zurich to Madrid.

[0] https://thetruesize.com/

This is super fun to play with. I was surprised to interactively discover that South Africa was bigger than the Nordic countries.

I lived above a pizza guy in Padova Italy and would occasionally go down to get a slice if I didn't feel like cooking and chat with him a bit.

When he realized I was from the US, he went "oooh, America is really big isn't it... what, it's got to be at least 1000 km across, right?!". Try almost 5!

Lets not forget Brazil, the mercator projection makes it seem much smaller but in reality it's surface area (8,515,770 Km2) exceeds that of the continental US (8,080,464.3 km2).

When I was in University, I had a roommate from Germany. He was blown away how if he wanted to drive east from our place to Montreal, it would be around 2900 km. Had he driven that far east from where he is from, he could have ended up in Asia.

He joked that if he made that trip in Europe, he would see hundreds of different cultures and hear languages he could barely recognize as language. But here, he could drink Tim Horton's coffee "and hate his life" the whole 2900 km trip. He wasn't big on Tim Horton's.....

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