burundi epitome of incomprehensibility Your capital city is Bujumbura. My brother's talking globe taught me that years ago, and I'd forgotten, though now I remember how I liked its bouncy sound. Bujumbura, Burundi. You speak Kirundi - a sound like my name, but better - and many other languages. Your lingua franca is French. The invaders left that much, besides, as they did in Rwanda, pitting Hutu against Tutsi. Postcolonially democratic now, you are roundish like my nose, but hotter and less snotty. You have a national park near Mutumba, which sounds like a Kenyan word for secondhand clothes (I know that through Zidisha). You are poor. You are statistically starving. Someone from you is doing a PhD in public health and maybe he'll come back to you, but you know that you're strong and you're not my nose, which must be a great comfort - in fact, blue_jewel Burundi, you're not the right colour to be any person's nose, though full of pores I could be poured into, if I had the money to travel the world, and see equatorial trees and everyday you, nosy as I am. 140314 ... e_o_i Near the end of 2018, the president changed the capital. It's Gitega now, not Bujumbura. I only know that because there was an article in the Gazette about two local people doing a trivia show. See, the journalist mentioned Burundi's capital being Gitega as an example of an obscure fact that one of them knew. Jokey tone, going like, "Aaaand just when you'd expect the capital to be the bigger city, Bujumbura!" Wink wink, because people in Montreal have never heard of Bujumbura at all, right? Right?? Sir. SIR. I dated someone from there. And I have dated exactly two people in my life. (For snappiness' sake, not counting the situation where I thought we were dating but he thought of me as a platonic friend, or another where things were sort of reversed...) And before that there was Leapfrog Explorer. A talking globe that encouraged sibling rivalry: if Y. was going to memorize capital cities to beat me at the Find City Capital game, then, by gum, I'd memorize them too. (But most of the time he won anyway.) 240213 what's it to you? who go blather from