Seven capitals: from the highest and lowest to the oldest and coldest – it’s pub quiz gold
Brush up your pub-quiz credentials with trivia and titbits about the No 1 cities
We all know people who can effortlessly reel off the capital cities of countries we’ve barely heard of. Trying to catch out these trivia buffs is futile. They know their Dominican Republics from their Dominicas and you’re unlikely to bamboozle them by asking about Guinea, Equatorial Guinea and Guinea Bissau. Or even Papua New Guinea.
YouTube is awash with cute kids reciting their ABCs (Athens, Bangkok, Cairo, etc), although the flawless performance of two-year-old Arina on a live television show, while impressive, does suggest that tiger parenting is alive and well in Ukraine.
Experts in this specialised field add extra layers of knowledge. They announce (to anyone who hasn’t managed to run away quickly enough) that Bangui, in the Central African Republic, lies on the Ubangi River, making it the only capital located on a river whose name is an anagram of its own. They’ll casually drop into conversation that Beijing is unique among first cities for having three consecutive dotted letters and that Thimphu, in Bhutan, is the world’s only capital without traffic lights.
Still awake? There’s more.
