Sunday, February 17, 2008

Places :: Fact

Buckingham Palace has over six hundred rooms.
Central Park located in New York has 125 drinking fountains.
Cimeti?re du P?re Lachaise located in Paris is the most visited cemetery in the world. The cemetery opened in 1805 and has over one million people buried there, including rock star Jim Morrison.
Every year, an igloo hotel is built in Sweden that has the capacity to sleep 100 people.
Frank Wathernam was the last prisoner to leave Alcatraz prison on March 21, 1963.
From 1939 to 1942, there was a undersea post office in the Bahamas.
Hawaii's Mount Waialeale is the wettest place in the world - it rains throughout the year and about 460 inches per annum.
Ho-Ho-Kus, a small town in New Jersey, is the only town in the United States of America that has two dashes in its name.
Honolulu, Hawaii boasts the only royal palace in the United States of America.
In 1785, the city of Paris removed bones from cemeteries to ease the overflow of dead people. They took these bones and stacked them in tunnels now known as the Catacombs. You can visit these tunnel attractions and work your way along long corridors, which are stacked with skulls and bones.
In Czechoslovakia, there is a church that has a chandelier made out of human bones.
In Las Vegas, casinos do not have any clocks.
In Las Vegas, the busiest and two most popular days chosen for couples to get married are St. Valentine's Day and New Year's Eve.
Levan, which is located in Utah, got its name from "navel" which is levan spelt backwards. It was named this because it is in the center of Utah.
One of the steepest main streets in Canada is located in Saint John, New Brunswick. Over a distance of two blocks the street rises about 80 feet.
Tacoma Narrows Bridge which was located in Washington was nicknamed "Galloping Gertie" because of the unusual way it twisted and swayed with even with the slightest winds when people would drive on it. The bridge collapsed on November 7, 1940, fortunately no humans died, except for a dog.
The American Airlines Center in Dallas has more toilets per capita than any other sports and entertainment venue in the country
The Golden Gate Bridge was first opened in 1937.
The Great Wall stretches for about 4,500 miles across North China.
The Hollywood sign was first erected in 1923. It was first erected as "Hollywoodland."
The Library of Congress, located in Washington D.C., is the largest library in the world.
The Mall of America, located in Bloomington, Minnesota is so big that it can hold 24,336 school buses.
The Mount Horeb Mustard Museum which is located in Wisconsin has the biggest collection of prepared mustards. They have approximately 4,000 different jars and tubes from all over the world.
The North of Scotland's oldest inhabited castle is Dunvegan Castle on the Isle of Skye.
The Sears Tower consists of nine framed tubes, which connects nine skyscrapers as one building.
The Sears Tower in Chicago contains enough steel to build 50,000 automobiles.
The Sears Tower located in Chicago, Illinois is made up 76,000 tons of steel.
The average stay for a prisoner on Alcatraz, when it was used as a prison, was five years.
The city of Chicago has the only post office in the world where you can drive your car through.
The deepest cave in the world is the "Lamprechtsofen- Vogelshacht" cave which can be found in Salzburg, Austria. The cave is 5,354 feet deep.
The first ice hotel was built in Swedish Lapland.
The largest ketchup bottle in the world is a 170 feet tall and is located in Collinsville, Illinois, USA. It was built in 1949 by the W.E. Caldwell Company as a water tower.
The largest school in the world is City Montessori School in India and has over 25,000 students in grade levels ranging from kindergarten to college.
The largest wedding chapel in Las Vegas is the Viva Las Vegas Chapel, which can seat 100 people.
The most famous movie theatre is the "Chinese Theatre" located in Los Angeles, USA.
The most popular vacation destinations for Americans in 1956 was Niagara Falls.
The names of the two stone lions in front of the New York Public Library are Patience and Fortitude. They were named by then-mayor Fiorello LaGuardia.
The oldest inhabited house in Scotland is the Traquair Castle. The castle has had 27 kings as visitors.
The only flying saucer launch pad in the world is located in St. Paul, Alberta, Canada.
The steepest street in the world is Baldwin Street located in Dunedin, New Zealand. It has an incline of 38%.
The tallest freestanding sculpture in the world is Chief Crazy Horse in South Dakota, USA.
The term "the Big Apple" came into common usage in the 1930s when touring jazz musicians referred to a town or city as an apple, making New York the Big Apple.
The world's largest bullfighting ring is in Mexico City. The "Plaza de Toros" opened in 1946 and has a seating capacity of about fifty thousand people.
The world's only museum of Phallology is in Reykjavik, Iceland. Phallology is the the science of the penis.
The world's tallest roller coaster is located in England and reaches a peak height of 72 meters.
The worlds tallest free fall rollercoaster is The Giant Drop located in Australia. The drops is 120 meters which is equivalent to a 39 storey building.
There are places in Saskatchewan called Elbow, Eyebrow, and Drinkwater.
There is enough concrete in the Hoover Dam to pave a two lane highway from San Francisco to New York.
There was a post office on the Russian space station Mir. Visiting cosmonauts would use unique postal "markers" to stamp envelopes and other items as having flown aboard the Mir space station.
Tomatina is the legendary Spanish tomato-throwing festival held in Bunol, Spain.