http://www.bloggersbase.com/anime--manga/japan-lots-of-mcdonalds/
This map was taken from a blog site called Bloggers Base, written by toonleap.
This is a map of the continents describing which countries do have a McDonald's and which countries do not have any McDonald's. The countries that do have McDonald's are colored in red and the countries that do not are colored in blue.
First of all, the thing I am the most shocked about this map is that there is not a McDonald's in every country. I am especially surprised by countries such as Mongolia and Bolivia which are completely surrounded by countries which probably have hundreds of McDonald's in them, but they just could not manage to get lucky enough to get even one. When wondering why Bolivia would not have a McDonald's I would assume that maybe this is do to political unrest or some kind of internal problem that somehow affected the building of the McDonald's, but then you look and even Cuba managed to get a McDonald's. Another point that stands out is that out of all the countries in African only THREE of the countries have McDonald's, which all three are some of the more developed countries on the continent. For some reason I had assumed that more underdeveloped countries, like many in Africa, would have at least one McDonald's in it because of it being a cheap food source, maybe being in a more urban area of the country, but more of the developed countries are enjoying their cheap hamburgers. My first assumption as to why these less developed countries in Africa or the Middle East would not have a McDonald's, would either be due to cultural or political differences.
http://www.peacefactory.com/map.html
This map came from a website called the PeaceFactory.com
This is a map of all the time zones of the world showing continent and country borders, minus Antarctica.
Time zones really amuse me because of the fact that China has the same time zone through the entire country. I just wonder why they would even want that because the guy waking up at 7am on the East side of the country is waking up to the sun but if a guy on the West side were to wake up at 7 am it would still be night time. China being a communist country, maybe they wanted everywhere to be the same, maybe they saw it as being equal but just the idea that China would want it to be the same time over the entire country blows my mind. I don't see time as something you can just pick and choose as you please, time is time. I would see it okay to nudge the line of a time zone so that maybe a whole city, or MAYBE a whole state be on the same time zone but a huge country, not so much. Another interesting thing about the map of time zones is that there is all of these little random nudges everywhere but as to why they would need to nudge the time zone in the middle of the ocean is peculiar. Sure in the case of islands such as Hawaii it would make sense, but why they would need to make several random nudges in the Atlantic Ocean is a mystery to me. Maybe there is an island in all of these nudges that I am just not noticing or perhaps there is some obvious reason as to why they are there and I'm just missing it.
http://www.geo.cornell.edu/hawaii/220/PRI/PRI_PT_hotspot.html
This is a map of the volcanic hotspots in the world. It outlines the borders of the different tectonic plates and is marked with red dots to show where the hotspots are.
This is another one of my favorite maps because I first learnt about volcanic hot spots in a geography class that I took at my community college. I feel like not many people know that volcanoes are only formed over these hot spots. I found it amazing that the islands of Hawaii were all formed over the one hot spot and as the Pacific plate moved it created these spread out Islands. Before that class, I thought that volcanoes all had their own hot spot and that some were active and some were not, but the fact that it's one hot spot that the plate moves over amazes me. I find it to be so interesting that there are all of these islands made from these hot spots, like the Galapagos Islands.
