I realize a lot of you aren’t at all clear about where I’m at. Don’t feel bad. Within the past 24 hours we have talked to two fairly intelligent people who had no real idea where Abu Dhabi is. One had never heard of the United Arab Emirates. And the other lives in Europe. Hmm.

Anyway, even those of us livin’ the dream on the shores of the Arabian Gulf … from time to time are foggy about our place on the planet, in comparison to other regions.

We’re almost exactly halfway around the world from Los Angeles. OK. Got that.

But where are we in comparison to Indonesia? To Bangladesh? To Kenya?

And the answer?

Hey, buy a globe.

So I did. The tiniest, cheesiest, cheapest actual globe I have ever seen. About the size of a cantaloupe, on a little pedestal.

And it was mine for 18 dirhams … or about 50 cents.

Now, if we want to know the answer to, “Hey, are we closer to Iraq or Afghanistan?” … we get the teeny globe down from above the fridge and eyeball it. (The answer: Their nearest border seems to be almost the same distance away.)

If we want to travel in the region, and wonder which is further, Sri Lanka or Kenya? Cairo or Cyprus?

Bring out the teeny globe.

(The answers: Kenya and Cairo.)

Now, where is the Gulf of Aden, exactly? And the Arabian Sea, that’s different than the Gulf, right? (The first is between Yemen and Somalia; the second is between the Arabian Peninsula and India and the third is this shallow stretch of water with Iran on one side and the UAE/Qatar/Saudi Arabia on the other.)

And then there are the big questions. Are we closer to Moscow or London? Capetown or Paris?

(Moscow and Paris.)

My little globe told me all that.

I always have loved globes and maps. But when you’re living abroad, and haven’t brought your library with you, and feel disinclined to spend a couple hundred bucks on the nice globe or lug around the 15-pound atlas …

The teeny globe is perfect. It weighs about two ounces. And for 50 cents, if something bad happens to it … hey, I’ll shell out 50 cents and buy another.

(Actually, the U.S. Department of Education ought to import 10 million of these and give them to school children. I’m serious. Americans are world-renown for not knowing where anything is. My 50-cent globe could fix that.)

To be sure, it looks like a legit globe. Just shrunken. The oceans are blue. The countries are yellow, pink, green, purple, biege.  Antartica is white. It has major rivers on it, and at least 100 cities (Miami, Washington, Philadelphia, New York,  Detroit, Chicago, St. Louis, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Seattle and Salt Lake City? from the U.S.)

Everything is the right size, proportionately speaking. Which in this case means France is about 3/8ths of an inch wide.

Admittedly, the workmanship is a little shaky. Whoever pasted the pieces of globe onto the ball (and I count 12 strips) didn’t spend a lot of time on it. The nation of Sudan, for example, looks like SUD AN on my 50-cent globe. Yes, with a space between the third and fourth letters.

(The globe appears to have been made in China. Doesn’t say so directly, but in an empty spot in the South Pacific, between Chile and New Zealand, it has a “legend” and under that it reads, “Compiled and published by Sinomaps Press.” Oh, and another tipoff: Tibet doesn’t exist on this planet. Just part of greater China, like the Chinese would prefer you to think.)

Anyway, I’ve always thought that every household — certainly every household with children in it — has to have a dictionary, an atlas and a globe. Bare minimum. Those are the essentials.

When you’re traveling? You can dispense with the first two, certainly the big heavy versions of them. But if you’re going to be gone for a year or more … gotta have a globe.

It makes me happy. Gives me a sense of where I am. At least once a day, I look at it,  and do the calculations, and when someone tells me that, hey, it takes longer to fly from here to Delhi than from here to Amman … I won’t be surprised.