Nope, but I think there may be Bavaria, Westfalia, Saxony? Can’t think of any others at the moment but I assume there are a couple more.

It’s a bit trickier, since Germany was still divided when I was in grade school.

It’s weird, Australian schools didn’t teach them either… does the rest of the world exist, perhaps?

And we also don’t shorten all of our countries expecting people to know what we meant.

Each state had to agree on the boundaries, and as with all of human history they were quite possessive and possibly greedy. Thats why in the middle of the Mojave Desert the lines are all clean and uniform: nobody was willing to fight over the middle of the Mojave Desert.

EDIT: Also it caused a lot of disputes when rivers were nobody's territory as they were a major mode of transportation and people on the river or crossing the river would end up being harassed by landowners on either side as if they owned the river.

Or, for another perspective: In terms of population, Ohio and Belgium are pretty much equal, but in terms of area, the former is 4x as large.

Reverse image search pulled up a post on the subreddit named after her. Generally I prefer to match a first party source, but Instagram is a pain in the ass, so I was content with the picture showing up on a dedicated subreddit and appearing consistent with other pictures posted.

Never been to America, no idea where Alabama is, but it's a well known fact that they... love family very much.

Eh i dont think there is any value in remembering stuff like that, especially if you are not from the US. But thanks for the explainer :)

I'm sure all those old European royal families are going, "Yeah, yeah, it's those tiny middle of nowhere American towns where the inbreeding happens. Not here. Never here."