Travel

 

I enjoy traveling, especially internationally. My perspective on geography and anthropology has completely changed due in part to traveling. There is no better way to gain an appreciation for the diversity of opinions and experiences around the world than to visit and appreciate wildly different places and people first-hand.

At a coarse level, the map shows which countries I’ve visited. In terms of initial reaction, it seems underwhelming. Too many of the countries I’ve been to are relatively small surface-area wise (Denmark and Taiwan barely show up at this scale).

I used the Matlab mapping toolbox to create this figure. I got the shapes of the world countries from geocommons. The axes and continent outlines are built-in to the mapping toolbox. If anyone is interested, below is the code to generate the figure.

%% Create Map of countries I've visited

visited = {'Germany','Switzerland','Austria','Denmark','Italy','Czech Republic',...
    'Sweden','Finland','United States','Canada','Argentina','Brazil', ...
    'Taiwan','Vietnam','New Zealand','Iceland'};
cShapes = shaperead('world_countries_boundary_file_world_2002.shp','usegeocoords',true);
names = {cShapes.NAME};

ax = worldmap('world');
setm(ax,'gcolor',[0.4 0.4 0.4]); % make the lat/lon lines a little darker

load coast;
plotm(lat,long,'k');
cmap = polcmap(numel(visited));

for i=1:length(visited)
    indx = find(strcmpi(visited{i},names));
    patchesm(cShapes(indx).Lat,cShapes(indx).Lon,cmap(i,:));
end