Last year when I was doing research online for my June 2004 trip around Europe, I was searching maps online and found a great map on the CIA (U.S. Central Intelligence Agency) web site. I was surprised to find it was part of a great resource online called World Factbook. You can even download the entire Factbook web site (30MB) free, and it appears to be kept up to date pretty well. A great example is a page with a map and lots of detail on the European Union updated just late month. There is a very cool page called Flags of the World. I plan to go back to Prague again this June, and I will review the Czech Republic page and other pages for any other countries I plan to visit. In addition to this useful resource web site, I found that a great simple world currency conversion web site at xe.com. The currency data is updated every minute and the home page displays the most popular currency rates in a chart, plus a quick currency converter below it.