dubai light

In 10th grade, my math teacher announced to the class his belief that the olympic rings are the colors: red, blue, yellow, black, and green because these colors can be found in the flags of every county on earth.  This is incorrect.  The colors of the olympic flag are meant to symbolize the five primary regions / continents of the globe: Africa, the Americas, Europe, Asia, and Oceania (there is no official correspondence, but at the flag's unveiling - side note: how does one unveil what is essentially a horizontal veil - in Olympic Games of 1920, the famously racist inhabitants of the host country, Belgium, came up with their own associations.)  Anyway, back to my math teacher.  He maintained that I may be correct, and I suggested that should I be able to find a country with a flag that contains no colors of the Olympic Rings, I should be given extra credit on the next quiz - as such an endeavor certainly demonstrates laudable ability in the realm of pre-calculus.  

If you would like to take a moment to see if you can figure out the country's flag - and I'm fairly certain there is only one - that I was able to find to earn my 5 extra credit points, I will give you an ellipsis to help pause the flow...  the country is Qatar

...okay, so you may have figured it out, you may have been stumped, you may have highlighted the section of text that came after my ellipsis, or you may have ignored this entire exercise that I so thoughtfully put together for you.  Regardless, the answer - and the flag are:

Qatar!

Qatar recently displaced one of my favorite vacation destinations: Luxembourg, as the country with the highest GDP per capita (conservative estimate: $86,000/person).  Most of Qatar's wealth comes from agricultural production and high-industry, ha ha, of course not, most of Qatar's wealth comes from oil.  Lots of oil.  The country straddles oil fields in both Saudi Arabia and Iran, and since only about 17 people actually lived there at the time when oil was discovered there in the 1940's, much like the United Arab Emirates, they've got so much money they don't know what to do with it.  Where Dubai built islands shaped like the world, Qatar is constructing a hugely unnecessary bridge - set to be the longest in the world - to an island in the gulf with which it share both a cultural heritage and the distinction of supporting the two most complete welfare states on earth.  When asked to explain the motivation for such a project, the Minister of the Interior was quoted as explaining: "...we've just got too much freaking money and it's not burning fast enough."

There aren't a whole lot of travel guides to Qatar, as it's not a tourist hotspot, but I'd like to take the chance to visit an oil-rich state before they all go to crap when the black stuff runs out.  So I'll be in Qatar for a short while, soaking up the rays, keeping up relations, and doing my best to smuggle a jar of oil back to the states.