Some juicy facts about Portugal (culled from wikipedia et al.):
Like Nebraska, Portugal has a unicameral legislative body. It's the world's largest exporter of cork, and port wine and madeira both come from Portugal. There are more activated cell phones there than there are people (pop. ~10.5M, only ~2.5M more than NYC). They have a civil law system. Portugal ranks 20th in the world in beer consumption, at 59.6 liters/capita annually (the UK comes in 6th, with 96.8 liters, and the US 13th, with 81.6). There's a cartoon festival every year, one of the biggest in the world, and a cartoon museum in Porto, Portugal (they dig that word, port).
"Portugal came into existence as an independent nation on June 24, 1128, when Afonso Henriques, Count of Portugal, defeated his mother, Countess Teresa, and her lover, Fernão Peres de Trava, in battle... In 1373, Portugal made an alliance with England, which is the longest-standing alliance in the world....In 1910, a revolution deposed the Portuguese monarchy, but chaos continued and considerable economic problems were aggravated by the military intervention in the First World War, which led to a military coup d'état in 1926. This in turn led to the establishment of a right-wing dictatorship by António de Oliveira Salazar. In the early 1960s, independence movements in the colonies of Angola, Mozambique, and Portuguese Guinea resulted in the Portuguese Colonial War. In 1974, a bloodless left-wing military coup known as the Carnation Revolution led the way for a modern democracy as well as the independence of the last colonies in Africa shortly after."
"In 2006 the world's largest solar power plant began operating in the nation's sunny south while the world's first commercial wave power farm opened in October 2006 in the Norte region. As of 2006, 55% of electricity production was from coal and fuel power plants. The other 40% was produced by hydroelectrics and 5% by wind energy. The government is channeling $3.8 billion into developing renewable energy sources over the next five years. Portugal wants renewable energy sources like solar, wind and wave power to account for nearly half of the electricity consumed in the country by 2010. 'This new goal will place Portugal in the frontline of renewable energy and make it, along with Austria and Sweden, one of the three nations that most invest in this sector,' Prime Minister Jose Socrates said."
And about the UK, all we really need to know is that the Beatles came from there, right?
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