I collect countries. I have 25 in my passports so far - not that many I realise, especially when, depending on who you ask, there are about 193 countries in the world for me to visit. But I'm working on the remaining 165.
This isn't real travelling, of course - it's an exercise in box-ticking, it's intercontinental stamp collecting, trainspotting on planes. And it's a habit I'm trying to break. What, after all, does it mean to visit a country? I lived in Japan for 10 years; I speak the language, I know the culture, I could find my way round Shinjuku or Ikebukuro blindfolded, the sounds and smells of the city I called home for a significant part of my life the only guides I'd need. I once spent half an hour in the middle of the night on a bus as it drove through Luxembourg. But there's two of my two dozen countries ticked off right there.
I've seen Japan - I've really seen Japan. But can I claim to have seen anything, meaningfully, of Luxembourg? Or Switzerland, or Belgium, two more countries I passed through, fleetingly, on my way to Rome when I was barely out of my teens? But I'm claiming them because I damned well have been to them.
I don't think I can claim to have visited Denmark. I changed planes in Copenhagen once, back in 1991, when I first went to Tokyo. But I didn't leave the airport, just as I didn't a few years ago when I had four hours in Singapore between planes from Sydney to London. I ate something that tasted, I like to believe, fairly authentically Singaporean at Changi Airport, but I didn't leave the airport, and I didn't get a passport stamp. So I'll not try to claim that I've been to Singapore. Leaving an airport, among country collectors, is considered essential; leaving the motorway is subject to a smidge more debate.
As, for that matter, is the question of what counts as a "country". All countries are not equal: I've been to Russia, the world's largest country (a visa-free tour around Moscow of highly questionable legality during an overnight stay that wasn't supposed to leave the Soyuz Transit Hotel) and the smallest (the Vatican is the only country I've seen whose public spaces are entirely paved), and the boxes I ticked for both countries were the same size. They're both countries. But what about, say, Gibraltar? That was country number five for me, a stop on a family cruise when I was a child. They have their own passports, their own currency, there - does Gibraltar count as a country? Perhaps not. But I'm claiming it, because my 25 remains a disappointingly low number.
