Happy Birthday to Panama!

Junkanoo celebration in Nassau, the capital of the Bahamas. Junkanoo is a street parade with music, dance, and costumes across the Bahamas every Boxing Day (December 26) and New Year’s Day (January 1). *Photo from Wikipedia July 10 is Independence Day, celebrates the independence of the Bahamas from the United Kingdom in 1973. The Bahamas became a British Crown colony in 1718, when the British clamped down on piracy. After the American War of Independence, the Crown resettled thousands of American Loyalists in the Bahamas; they brought their slaves with them and established plantations on land grants. Africans constituted the

The Chain Bridge, the most famous Budapest bridge built in 1849. *Photo from Wikipedia August 20 is Saint Stephen’s Day – Hungary’s first king St. Stephen’s Day, also the day of the Foundation of Hungary and “the day of the new bread”. St. Stephen of Hungary (975 – 1038), as the first king of Hungary, led the country into the Christian church and established the institutions of the kingdom and the church. Following centuries of successive habitation by Celts, Romans, Huns, Slavs, Gepids (East Germanic tribe) and Avars (a group of Eurasian nomads), the foundation of Hungary was laid in

Torii (鳥居, a traditional Japanese gate most commonly found at the entrance of or within a Shinto shrine) in Liberdade, São Paulo. Liberdade is home to the largest Japanese community outside Japan in the world. *Photo from Wikipedia September 7 is Independence day, celebrates the independence of Brazil from Portugal in 1822. The first European to colonize Brazil was Pedro Álvares Cabral on April 22, 1500 under the sponsorship of the Kingdom of Portugal. From the 16th to the early 19th century, Brazil was a colony and a part of the Portuguese Empire. Brazil remained a Portuguese colony until 1808,