<p>St. Paul, Minnesota, was originally called Pig's Eye after a man named Pierre "Pig's Eye" Parrant who set up the first business there.</p>

<p>In the Sahara Desert, there is a town named Tidikelt, which did not receive a drop of rain for ten years. Technically though, the driest place on Earth is in the valleys of the Antarctic near Ross Island. There has been no rainfall there for two million years.</p>

<p>Damascus, Syria, was flourishing a couple of thousand years before Rome was founded in 753 BC, making it the oldest continuously inhabited city in existence.</p>

<p>Woodward Avenue in Detroit, Michigan, carries the designation M-1, so named because it was the first paved road anywhere.</p>

<p>Next to Warsaw, Chicago has the largest Polish population in the world.</p>