Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego?

Growing up I used to watch this show. It was touted as the fun way to learn geography. I'm sure this show, along with my elementary and high school education have taught me generally where countries are located.

Through the UCLA extension program, I'm going towards a certificate in International Trade and Commerce. It's definitely not all that and more. One of the courses I'm taking this quarter is titled, 'Doing Business in Europe.' This is taken verbatim from the course syllabus:

DOING BUSINESS IN EUROPE is a 12 week course designed to introduce various participants to approaches, opportunities, and risks of doing business in the markets of the Western and Eastern Europe, primarily Germany, France, United Kingdom, Ireland, Austria, Spain, Portugal, Sweden, Norway, and Finland, Greece, and Turkey. The course focuses primarily on the member nations of the European Union.

I should sue the program for false advertisement. Let me re-hash what I've learned about doing business in Europe after 4 weeks (a quarter of the way through the quarter)

1) The Swedes are the most educated group of people

If you read that line and you didn't know it before you read it, you owe me $181. That's about what 4 weeks of this class has cost me.
I sit in class for 3 hours every Tuesday evening bored out of my mind. I think gouging my own eyes out with an icepick would be a more pleasant experience. Studying for the bar was more interesting. Yes, read that again-studying for the bar was more interesting!

Last night we discussed the roles of various religions and how they effect business policies. Fair enough. However, we had already discussed religion last class. So this class session, we broke into groups of 3-4, had to pick a country, and talk about how the various religions affect business decisions by companies in that particular country. It sounds like a good plan. Until you realize that the class is made up of students (students in the sense that no person has more than a year or two working experience, not student in the sense that we are students taking this course). And I already learned the first class that no one has any experience working in another country or working for a company in that company's global relations/sales department. Basically none of us bring anything to the table. Which is fine. That just means that it cannot be as interactive as the professor had hoped, and as the students, we rely on him for information on doing business in Europe.

So, with none of us having any global working experience, we can't really say how religion shapes the business practice of a company doing business in Europe. Nevertheless, we trudge on. Here's the kicker. The first group picked as their country India. The second group picked Japan. My group picked France. The last group picked Russia. Now tell me when Japan and India were officially recognized as European countries?