Hello!

This is a project that Owen Powell and Alex Horne started on October 24th, 2006 (United Nations Day), and finished on October 24th, 2007. Our aim was to prove that London is the most cosmopolitan city in the world, by endeavouring to meet and chat to a citizen from every country in the world who currently lives and works in London.

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We managed to meet people from 189 countries. According to the UN, there are 192 countries in the world, so we've proved that at the very least, London contains over 98.4% of the nations of the world!

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We are still looking for people from three countries:

Marshall Islands; Palau; Tuvalu.

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The final encounters during our year appear below, but to follow our story from the start please click on the links under 'How we're doing' on the left-hand side.  The countries appear in the order in which we found their representative. (Any country with an asterisk * next to it has a brief account of the interview - longer versions will appear in the future!)

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To find out more about the project, including our self-imposed rules, then click here.

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Follow this link if you have the urge to see us looking awkward on Channel 4 news.  Or just below you can see us when we were half-way through the project being interviewed by George Alagiah on BBC World.

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Please email us on worldinonecity@hotmail.com if you want to get in touch, or if you know any shy Londoners who are also Tuvaluan, Palauan or Marshallese.

George Alagiah interviews us on the BBC

Wednesday 25 July 2007

No.122: Kuwait

Full story to follow…

Alex Horne - 25th July 2007

Mishaal went to university in New York in 1990, the same year that the US and UK invaded Kuwait to remove Saddam. If he’d tried to leave a year later it wouldn’t have been possible. ‘That year changed a lot of people’s lives’, he said. He and a friend watched the fighting on CNN.

‘I was firmly anti war’, he continued, ‘but at the same time I felt ‘that’s my country he’s pillaging – I want them to get him out… diplomacy hasn’t worked for so many years’. At that time my view of war changed. After continued aggression you have to respond to defend. That’s the only way to get back to diplomacy.’

Mishaal, meanwhile, found himself swept up in the internet revolution of the early nineties: ‘It was very exciting and creative. People would just walk in with money making offers. I worked on the first internet banking system. The US was where it was at. That’s why I never considered going back to Kuwait’.

He’s currently working with some scientists at Imperial College on a business plan for a medical device that employs biotechnology to do something that he explained in detail but which I couldn’t really understand.
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