The Banana Bread Provider of Erastide is a gargantuan, safe nation, ruled by Polgara with an even hand, and remarkable for its museums and concert halls, smutty television, and national health service. The compassionate, cheerful population of 39.114 billion Erastideans are fiercely patriotic and enjoy great social equality; they tend to view other, more capitalist countries as somewhat immoral and corrupt.

The government — a sprawling, bureaucracy-choked, socially-minded morass — juggles the competing demands of Education, Environment, and Welfare. It meets to discuss matters of state in the capital city of Kytum. The income tax rate is 100%.

The thriving Erastian economy, worth a remarkable 7,288 trillion ducats a year, is highly specialized and mostly made up of the Book Publishing industry, with significant contributions from Tourism, Information Technology, and Trout Farming. State-owned companies are reasonably common. Average income is an impressive 186,339 ducats, and distributed extremely evenly, with little difference between the richest and poorest citizens.

High school bands practice by moonlight, sports fans complain that cricket tests now last an unbearable ten days, the WhoTube comments section has gone strangely quiet, and money that should have gone to charities is instead spent on monitoring them. Crime is totally unknown, thanks to a well-funded police force and progressive social policies in education and welfare. Erastide's national animal is the peacock, which frolics freely in the nation's many lush forests.

Erastide is ranked 154^th in the world and 1^st in Lemuria for Most Popular Tourist Destinations, with 4,453.97 Tourists Per Hour.