Seychelles

All right regular dudes, it's been awhile but I'm back, because I'm bored and it's raining outside. The reason it's taken me more than a year to come up with a new entry is because this country, Seychelles, is really hard to write about without just recycling everything I've already said about every other useless island chain (Do you all really need to be your own sovereign states, useless island chains? It is the opinion of this author that you do not). Seychelles, located in the Indian Ocean, seems nice enough, but that might be because I've only been able to do the bare minimum of research without getting bored, then sleepy, then watching old Prince clips on YouTube for about two and a half hours before making a sandwich while singing "Purple Rain" out loud to myself and quietly hoping that none of my roommates are home. The capital is Victoria. That's a picture of it down there. We're back, team! Congratulations!

This is Victoria. Seems pretty nice, right? Who cares, though? It's not like you'll ever go there.

Serbia

I've only ever known one person from Serbia, a landlocked country in centralish-southeasterny Europe. He was the professor of a college course I took entitled "War, Technology and Society." Based on my experience with him, I'd say that Serbians are a grumpy, diminutive people who all talk gleefully and knowledgeably about medieval war implements and spout adorable bits of folk wisdom like "Never rub a man's face in defeat. Just kick him until he stops moving." That's probably a safe generalization, isn't it? Serbian people dislike Albanians and Chelsea Handler.

Most Serbs.

Senegal

Senegal is a West African nation wrapped around the Gambia, a small strip of land which the aforementioned Senegal never had the gumption or the inclination to conquer for itself and feast on its riches. The other nearby areas which Senegal has failed to annex and subjugate include Guinea-Bissau, Mali, Mauritania and the vast unclaimed depths of the Atlantic Ocean. Despite having a diverse array indigenous languages, the national language of Senegal is French, which I personally think was taking the easy way out. I've recently decided to start calling Senegal "The Disappointment of West Africa" based on its chronic underachievement in categories like size by area (88th in the world), size by population (72nd!) and GDP (111th, behind Iceland. Iceland, you guys!). Come on Senegal. Why can't you be more like your brother?

Senegal's capital, Dakar, is tiny compared to the world's largest city, Shanghai. What a letdown.

Saudi Arabia

Saudi Arabia is a country in the Middle East where everybody is constantly at least kind of mad because it's hot all the time, sand gets into all of your shit and no one is ever allowed to have any fun doing anything. It's kind of like Utah, if you've ever been there before. Saudi Arabia is an Islamic absolute monarchy, which I think basically means that if you live there, you shouldn't fuck around. Saudi Arabia is also located on top of the world's largest oil reserves, which means that despite continued criticism over human rights issues such as equality between men and women and the perennial question of whether or not cutting off the hands and feet of minor offenders is the best method of criminal rehabilitation, the king (currently Abdullah bin [more names]) still gets to have lots of weird sleepovers with powerful foreign heads of state. Saudi royalty aren't really all that different from the kid you knew in the fourth grade who was kind of a shitty person, but you hung out with him anyway because he had a Sega Dreamcast and Crazy Taxi was a really fun game.

The Burj al-Mamlaka, Saudi Arabia's tallest building, was built in 2002, in case someone ever needs to open a really huge bottle.

São Tomé and Príncipe

São Tomé and Príncipe is the smallest country in the world, aside from some other countries that are smaller. An island nation located some amount of miles off the coast of west Africa, São Tomé and Príncipe was uninhabited before the year 1470, when the islands were discovered by Portuguese explorers conducting an experiment to see if they could find São Tomé and Príncipe. As it turned out, they could. In 1975, São Tomé and Príncipe gained its independence from Portugal as part of an experiment to see if they could do a better job on their own. I haven't managed (nor have I tried) to find any statistics on whether or not that worked out, so I'm gonna assume that it did. One thing I like about São Tomé and Príncipe is that São Tomé has a tilde in it. I think that's pretty cool.

São Tomé and Príncipe's president is Fradique de Menezes, seen here wearing a dumb-looking bowtie.

San Marino

San Marino (also known as The Most Serene Republic of San Marino [Really, San Marino? "Most serene?" There's a claim to fame. (Sarcasm!!!)]) is one of the European microstates, which is a nice way of saying that it has a soccer team that has never, ever won. San Marino is located in the Apennine Mountains, totally surrounded by Italy like a Vatican City with no popes in it. San Marino is the oldest sovereign state currently in existence, probably because it's really not all that difficult to maintain sovereignty over a tennis court-sized area in a mountainous region. Congratulations, I guess. Originally founded in the fourth century as a haven for Christians who were sick of the Roman Empire calling them mean, but not very clever names like "Christhole" and "Jesus balls." The nation's capital is the city of San Marino, located in the shadow of the country's highest peak, Mount Titano (Italian for "Mount Tittaaaays").

San Marino is named after its founder, Saint Marinus, shown here building some sort of thing.

Samoa

Samoa is an island nation in the south Pacific Ocean, the land mass of which is made up entirely of coconuts that have agglomerated in a massive pile due to a peculiar vortexy tidal situation. (Author's Note: Is that a racist thing to say? It feels like it was kind of racist. Or at least cruel and minimizing. I apologize to any and all of my Samoan readers.) The two largest islands in Samoa are Upolu and Savai'i, but even these so-called "main islands" are tiny as hell. The Samoan economy is based largely on tourism and agriculture, with its primary export being vaguely ethnic professional wrestlers - though Jimmy "Superfly" Snuka turns out to have been Fijian (Author's Note: Glad I looked that up, or I would have looked even more racist just now), prominent stars of Samoan extraction have included a guy named Rikishi, whose gimmick was "The Samoan Man with the Giant Fat Ass," as well as esteemed dramatic actor Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson. The capital, Apia, is nothing to write home about.

Sometimes Samoan people get weird tattoos.