Is there a country other than your native country that you know a lot about?

I was reading the NYT and a lot of the news there is about other countries. Supposedly Americans are pretty parochial and hardly ever pay any attention to news about other nations. For example, even though we share a long border with it, many Americans might know nothing about Canada other than it is cold and it has Mounties. Other Americans and people from other nations may know a good deal about one or more other countries.

I was a Russian Studies major in college. Before that, I visited the country when I was sixteen. I was there for five days. It was very interesting, and that inspired me to learn the language and read the literature. That was back in the Soviet times. Now I don’t know so much. I keep tabs, sort of, but I don’t make an effort to get a lot of information, because I no longer feel like I have a handle on it. The free market Russia is too wild west for me.

So do you have another country you know something about? A country that perhaps you might follow? What country is it, and why do you follow it?