Wallis and Futuna Islands may be open on Saturday, as they really have nothing else better to do.
Post and Pre market trading
- Thread starter VicBee
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Wallis and Futuna Islands may be open on Saturday, as they really have nothing else better to do.
I had to Google that. I have never heard of Wallis and Futuna.
Just imagine all the secrets about futures you can learn from me, if Polynesian islands are the thrill d'jour. Stick around, kid, you'll learn much.
Very important islands in the story of my family! My grand father was born there, at a time when it took many months to reach these islands, weather permitting.
If you want isolation you don't have to go to the South Pacific although the weather is probably a lot better there.
Tristan da Cunha, more remote than Antarctica and only accessible by boat.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tristan_da_Cunha
Tristan da Cunha, more remote than Antarctica and only accessible by boat.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tristan_da_Cunha
I didn't mean to downplay the importance of Wallis and Fortuna. I was just amazed that I had never heard of them especially since I once spent a one month sabbatical living in their neighboring islands of Fiji. But that was 25 years ago, before the Internet became popular so it was not easy to find info on neighboring places
No worries, it's not often that I see Wallis and Futuna mentioned!
No worries, it's not often that I see Wallis and Futuna mentioned!
The even weirder story is how I discovered them. It was thanks to the Internet of old.
Back in 1996-1999, I cannot remember when exactly, a relative and I were desperately trying to find some old "Ant and Aardvark" cartoon videos. We searched and searched the web, and finally found someone who was hosting the video files on a FTP site based at xxx.xxxx.wf. I do not recall the site's name either, but I remembered that top-level domain name. It was very odd.
Remember, this is the time when everything was just .com, .edu .net and .org. So I looked it up, and found it was Wallis/Futuna.
The insane obscurity of finding some server hosting "Ant and Aardvark" cartoons at that domain stuck with me all these years. Truly fascinating.
For a little history, Wallis and Futuna were French islands. My great grandfather was a colonial medical doctor sent by the French government to manage the affairs of its pacific island colonies in the early 1900s. While on Wallis he came to realize that the local catholic church had basically turned the population into servile children of God, living and working like slaves to empower the local priest. My ancestor was an anti clerical freemason promoted to governor. One of his first decisions was to wrestle power from the priest and, by extension, the Church. The tension became so strong that it turned into an armed conflict between the priest and his supporters and the governor and his supporters... my grandfather recounted in a book how as a new born, his mother would juggle keeping him from crying while loading the gun that my grandfather would unload on the coming locals. The battle had come back to Paris who made a deal with the Vatican to recall my ancestor while they would recall the priest and abolish servitude on Wallis and Futuna.
Here's the specific episode we were looking for. And some dude at xxx.xxx.wf were hosting them over 20 years ago.
Thank the Jesus for the Youtubes, hehe.