The Asian country is broke, and is offering the European nation a down payment. But not a “cash” down payment. This country wants to pay in produce – that is, ginseng root. 20 tons of it.

The European country that’s waiting for payment isn’t so crazy about the proposed deal. So can you name the two countries that are trying to resolve this decades-old debt?

But first, for today’s Geo Quiz, we wanted you to name two countries that have been considering an unusual way to erase an old debt.

North Korea owes the Czech Republic about ten million dollars. Pyongyang is offering to pay a fraction of that debt now, but not in cash. It wants to pay in ginseng.

The BBC’s Rob Cameron in Prague know more.
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“It’s a community that’s dependent on the hunting of sea mammals because of global warming there are fewer animals to kill and its increasingly dangerous to do so using these ancient traditional techniques that they use and so it looks like now this entire community could be moved further south within 10-15 years and if that happens the language culture the way of life will all go will all disappear.”

So where would you find this community? That’s our question.

It’s on the shore of a huge island that’s almost completely covered in ice, a large chunk of which broke off this week.

and our Geo Quiz takes us to northern Greenland where linguistic anthropologist Stephen Pax Leonard is headed this weekend.

“What I’m doing I think is unusual I’m going to be living their way of life with this community for a whole year, learning their language.”

The community he’s talking about is the town of Qaanaaag, population 600 or so Inuits. It’s one of the northern most towns in the world.

It’s also considered to be at risk due to global warming. So Pax Leonard’s mission is to document the local traditions… and the local dialect, called Iniktun, before they disappear:

“I can’t save this language, I’m not going there to save protect Iniktun forever, but I do think if this culture disappears within a short period of time it is well worth having a record of it because although this is a remote corner of Greenland this is really the basis of Greenlandic culture and narrative.”

Pax Leonard says adapting to life in Greenland’s far north…will take some fortitude. Winter temperatures hover around minus 40 F and the sun doesn’t rise from October till March.

Sounds like fun right? So where in China are we?

…. and the capital of Hebei Province is the Chinese city of Shijiazhuang. That’s where the China Girls Math Olympiad is taking place. The 8 teenagers on the US girls math team competed against teams from countries including Russia, China and Australia.

US Girls Math Team (Photo courtesy of Mathematical Sciences Research Institute in Berkeley)

We talk with Lynnelle Ye who just graduated from Palo Alto High School in California and Elizabeth Synge a senior from Boston.
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• The team’s online travelogue

It boasts magnificent Buddhist temples, and it’s surrounded by sprawling tea plantations. Tourists flock there each summer to see the Perahara. You can get up close and personal to a lavishly costumed elephant.

“This elephant has tusks about 4 feet long, his trunk right now is sweeping the ground in front of him, he’s got pile of I think these are palm leaves which are his snack before the parade.”

…so can you come up with the name of the Sri Lankan city where the festval is being held.

And the Buddhist festival called the Perahera just got underway in the city of Kandy and that’s the answer to our Quiz.

John Stifler sent us a postcard from the previous festival and, as you’ll hear it’s quite a scene. (Audio available after 5PM Eastern)

(Photo courtesy Havana Surf Club)

It’s got lots of large mansions left over from its glamorous days – back in the 1950′s. And there’s a 600-seat theater from that era that still stands – even if it could use a little maintenance now. It’s not all in the past for this Havana neighborhood, though. Today, there are several posh hotels, overlooking some beautiful beaches. And there’s a surfer’s club, too.

The answer we’re looking for is Miramar.

Michael Scott Moore has written a fascinating book that traces how surfing spread from Polynesia to Hawaii and California, and then to the rest of the world. It’s called Sweetness and Blood.

Listen to an excerpt:
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The book’s about more than surf boards and waves. It’s really about how the freedom and rebellion of America in the 1960s got mutated by surf culture, and how that mutation now appears all over the world in some pretty unexpected places. Cuba, Bali, and Morocco for example.

Listen to our interview:
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(Photo: Ben Gilbert)

Then there’s the logistics. The troops require a lot of support to get the job done. That means setting up facilities very close to the front lines.

For today’s quiz, we want you to give us one of the names used by the military to describe a base very close to the front lines.

The term we were looking for is “Forward Operating Base” or FOB. The US has many FOBs in Iraq and Afghanistan. The large ones have many tents and other structures where personnel live and work. And all of them need to be heated in the winter, and cooled in the summer. That can take a lot of fuel.

Steve Anderson is a retired Brigadier General who was General David Petraeus’s chief logistician in Iraq. He says the Pentagon should find ways to make structures at FOBs and other military compounds more energy efficient, not only to save money and be greener, but also, to save lives.
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And it’s a phenomenon that’s being monitored by marine scientists:

“It’s covering an area from Finland toward the coast of sweden toward the coast of poland, a little bit patch of course up to germany up to german coast coast”.

This European sea borders Denmark, Sweden, Finland, Russia, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland and Germany. It’s a brackish inland sea and like the Black Sea, this one was formed by glacial erosion during an Ice Age.

and the answer is the Baltic Sea where satellite images taken last week by the European Space Agency show a giant green algae bloom.
The World’s David Leveille has more:
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(flickr image: Elias Pirasteh)

You can use a Qibla locator or a simple compass, even an I-phone app to figure out Qibla. Sometimes, it can be confusing. In Chicago – for example – Qibla is 48 degrees north. And in Indonesia, even some Muslim clerics got it wrong recently.

So where are we pointing?

The answer is Mecca, Saudi Arabia, where the holiest Islamic shrine Ka’ba is located. Anchor Marco Werman speaks with Usef Arefin of the BBC’s Indonesia Service about confusion that’s arisen in Indonesia over the Qibla, the geographic direction that Muslims face when they pray to Mecca.
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• More about the Muslim prayer compass
• Qibla locator
• Geo Quiz Archive

(flickr image: will_cyclist)

The steep route takes all the strength riders can muster. Here’s how one cyclist describes the view over the handlebars:

“It’s one of the most beautiful parts of the Pyrenees actually, it’s unbroken remote wild mountain landscape, very beautiful flecks of white snow but then very deep intense green of the vegetation and looking down into the valleys and forests, it’s a very, very beautiful part of Europe.”

We’ll hear more about today’s grueling stage of the Tour de France. First try and name this mountain pass the lends its name as well to a type of cheese. It’s made from the sheep that occasionally wander across the mountain roads there.

(flickr image: clodius_maximus)

Robert Penn is author of “It’s All About The Bike – The Pursuit of Happiness on Two Wheels”.

And while he hasn’t ridden in the tour, he has taken on the mountain in today’s Geo quiz. It’s the Col du Tourmalet in the department of Hautes-Pyrénées in France.

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Molly Malone (flickr image: Loic Pinseel)

The lyrics suggest Molly was a beautiful fishmonger who went up and down the streets hawking the catch of the day. Today there’s a statue of Molly on this city’s Grafton Street. She’s wheeling her baskets of fresh cockles and mussels on a cart.

A newly discovered version of the old tune may shed some more light on Molly Malone.

So what is the name of Molly’s city?

So — where did the beautiful Molly Malone peddle her cockles and mussels? On the streets of Dublin’s Fair City, of course, so Dublin is the answer to our Geo Quiz.

Maev Kennedy is a native of Dublin and a reporter for The Guardian newspaper. And today she wrote about a much older version of the song “Cockles and Mussels” that’s turned up, adding a new twist to Molly’s story.
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(Photo: Katy Clark)

“The old warriors entered the fountain: more than 46 bathed in it and when they came out they were age 30 and like the best of knights. Alexander, he could hardly recognize them, so young they were”.

Fictional pirate Jack Sparrow searches for it in the next “Pirates of the Caribbean” movie. He follows the footsteps of Ponce de León. The Spanish explorer thought the Fountain was in Florida. He looked for it there — but never found it.

However, there is a place in Florida that is closely associated with the Fountain’s legend. Can you name it?

Lots of places have been associated with the “Fountain of Youth.”legend through the ages. But one of them stands out: St. Augustine, Florida, home to “The Fountain of Youth Archaeological Park.”

Florida school children are required to visit the Fountain of Youth before graduating (Photo: Katy Clark)

The park attracts 100,000 visitors a year. Most come by bus. Spanish explorer Ponce de León arrived by ship back in 1513. He’s said to have encountered a group of unusually tall natives who seemed to live longer than Europeans did at that time. Which convinced Ponce de León that the Fountain of Youth must be nearby.

John Stavely is the park’s tour guide:

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Katy Clark was speaking there with guide John Stavely, at “The Fountain of Youth Archeological Park” in St. Augustine, Florida, the answer to our Geo Quiz.

Here are some pieces of the puzzle: It’s chilly and raining in the New Zealand capital of Wellington today, but Kiwis don’t have all that much to complain about.

Iceland and Japan are both island nations that carry on commercial whaling. Austria maintains neutrality — but it regularly joins UN-led peacekeeping missions – in Kosovo and the Golan Heights for example.

And finally Norway, the lone Nordic country on our list of five. It’s one of Europe’s most sparsely populated countries, and a top exporter of oil, gas and seafood. So do you see a pattern here?

What do New Zealand – Iceland – Japan – Austria – and Norway have in common?

Well, the answer is they are the most peaceful places to live in the world. The five countries top this year’s Global Peace Index.

(image courtesy of Vision of Humanity)

• More info on the Global Peace Index

New Zealand gets top honors for the second year in a row. That country’s “peace indicators” include: a low homicide rate, a tiny military budget, and a healthy respect for human rights. On the flip side, Iraq came in last in the ranking of 150 countries.

Overall — the academics and peace organizations that compile the index — say the world has become a less peaceful place in the past year, due to the global recession. They say western Europe was far more peaceful than sub Saharan Africa.

The good news is that there’s less armed conflict around the world… Though homicide rates and violent crime are on the rise in some countries. But all in all — the forecast calls for a “partly peaceful” day around the globe.

• Global Peace Index
• Vision of Humanity
• Geo Quiz archive

The characters in many of these stories were able to change their appearance. And it seems folks in the modern-day city are doing the same. Or at least they’re having a plastic surgeon do a little nip and tuck.

So which ancient Arab city is enjoying a surge in cosmetic surgery?

… and that city is the capital of Iraq : Baghdad.

During the past seven years of conflict in Iraq, thousands of people were wounded and needed reconstructive surgery. Now, the violence has dropped. And there’s an rise in demand for more cosmetic transformations. The BBC’s Jim Muir introduces us to one of Baghdad’s busy plastic surgeons. (Audio available after 5PM Eastern)

The water lily in question went on display this week at the Royal Botanic Gardens also known as Kew Gardens outside London. A team of scientists and conservationists rescued the flowering plant from extinction.

It’s original home was the nation of Rwanda – and that’s the answer to our Geo Quiz.

The World’s David Leveille has the story:
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Now the case is cracked: Poland will officially honor the Renaissance astronomer with a reburial ceremony. We’re wondering if you know where.

We can tell you its a small town in north eastern Poland, in the province of Warmian-Masurian. Its 700-year-old cathedral was bombed in WWII but still stands tall. Astronomers and historians will soon converge on a graveyard behind that cathedral to pay tribute to Copernicus.

… and the answer is Frombork, Poland. Harvard Professor Emeritus of Astronomy and History of Science Owen Gingerich will be at the ceremony and tells anchor Marco Werman why it took more than 450 years for Copernicus to find a final resting place.

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