Eight years ago I wrote several posts for this blog about June Academy at Weston High School. You may want to read the first of those posts before continuing with this one.

Anyhow, one of the courses offered for June Academy was called “The Amazing Race.” I didn’t understand what it was really all about from the course description, and I didn’t bother checking Wikipedia since I had no idea that it was based on an apparently well-known television series.

Then we come to “Jet Lag,” a British show based on (or inspired by) The Amazing Race. This one I learned about from Tom Scott’s weekly newsletter. Who is Tom Scott, you ask? Well, according to Wikipedia he “creates educational videos across a range of topics including history, geography, linguistics, science, and technology. As of February 2025, his five YouTube channels have collectively gained over 7.88 million subscribers and 1.93 billion views,” so why haven’t you heard of him?

Actually, those numbers aren’t why I’ve heard of him; in my case it’s just that I had shared many of his educational videos with my classes, especially since most of them were about math or linguistics. I highly recommend his work. Anyway, he’s not a regular on Jet Lag, but he’s a guest star on the current set of episodes, which I also highly recommend. No math or linguistics this time; it’s geography. The shtick is that there are two teams of two participants, each of whom start in London and have to travel to as many of a specified set of countries as they can, between 7:30 AM and 5:30 PM each day. The countries range from big (Germany) to tiny (Liechtenstein). You get credit for setting foot in the country, so passing through without stopping doesn’t count, and you get extra points for meeting challenges. An example of a challenge is “Eat a food in its namesake place.” For example, Belgian waffle in Belgium or Black Forest Cake in the Black Forest or Danish pastry in Denmark. Sounds like Survivor, doesn’t it? So maybe it’s based on Survivor. Since it’s Europe, travel is primarily by train. Trains tend to be on time, which helps.

A small spoiler: one team happened to arrive in Germany on a day when everything was closed, because it was a holiday in that particular state! Something like arriving in Boston on Bunker Hill Day. Who would have known?

Categories: Life