Countries are strange

[franceslievens]

Oh look, Boing Boing has discovered the Belgian town Baarle-Hertog and its Dutch neighbour Baarle-Nassau. There is no clear divide between the two towns, which means several houses stand on the border between Belgium and the Netherlands. There has been a case recently where they had to mark the border in a house where a body was found, to be sure whether the victim was in Belgium or in the Netherlands. I'm not quite sure whether this was in the exact same town.
More information in the original post they linked to (although I have the feeling there are some mistakes in that post), or on Wikipedia.
Baarle-Hertog and Baarle-Nassau are indeed part of the bigger town Baarle, which for some historical reason, got divided between what later was to become Belgium and the Netherlands.

Comments

[sister-luck.livejournal.com]

Thanks to Germany's own stupidity, namely invading neutral Belgium in 1914, and the Treaty of Versailles Belgium also owns small parts of Germany, or rather the tracks and some surrounding land (http://geosite.jankrogh.com/vennbahn.htm) of the Vennbahn (http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vennbahn), a now mostly disused railway line, thereby separating five bits of German land from the rest of Germany.

This article (http://www.zeit.de/2008/04/Lsp-Enklave) tells the story of a German family living on Belgian territory and their struggles with the bureaucracies in two countries, though I object to the exaggeration of saying that they live 'in the middle' of North Rhine-Westphalia.

[frances-lievens.livejournal.com]

I think your right about that middle of North Rhine-Westphalia not really being the middle. They train-tracks lie practically next to the Belgian border.

You're talking what we call the "Oostkantons", the little bits of Belgium where people talk German, because they used to be part of Germany. They have there own little community and parliament there (communities are language-based, whereas regions are based on territory). I think they must be the head-shaking bystanders in all the kerfuffle that's going on right now.

[sister-luck.livejournal.com]

Yes, did you notice the link in Die Zeit to the article about Belgium called Ein unregierbares Land? Strangely enough, the commentary (http://www.zeit.de/online/2008/29/belgien-kommentar) is a lot less negative than the title suggests.

[frances-lievens.livejournal.com]

Didn't notice it. More and more I start to feel like that cartoon in the newspaper a couple of weeks back: it features a man and wife at the desk of a tour operator. The man said: "Somewhere without political news from Belgium, please." Really it's depressing how everything just goes on and on and over and over. I've heard it all before, I'd love to move on.

[sister-luck.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I can understand that feeling. It must be very frustrating, especially as some journos are just piling on the gloom. I watched one segment on Belgium from a foreign affairs programme on German tv last night and it was very very bad, re-hashing old news (the Miss Belgium thing) and just generally perpetuating certain stories, like the firefighters not speaking the right language resulting in a house burning to the ground. (Which I kind of doubt, not because I don't believe there aren't language issues, but because even people who don't speak the same language are able to to show the firefighters where to get water. It doesn't take fluency in a foreign language to know that firefighters need access to water. Being in a hospital and not being fluent in the language is another thing though.)

[frances-lievens.livejournal.com]

Living in Brussels I don't bother about the language thing. We get by.

I read an interview with a firefighter from Brussels over the weekend. He was chief of the firefighters in Brussels and he said "Language problems? I know which firefighters I need to address in Dutch and which ones in French. When they're at the scene they all know what to do, whatever language they speak."

And I know which hospital to go to: the one 10 minutes from where we live. It's the hospital from the Dutch speaking university. They are bilingual though, because they have to be.

[sister-luck.livejournal.com]

See, that's what I thought, but this programme was trying to tell its viewers that the two different languages were causing lots of problems. That's only a smokescreen I believe.

[syderia]

It reminds me of Voltaire, who deliberately built his house on the France/Switzerland border in order to escape the French police without too much bother.

[frances-lievens.livejournal.com]

Back in the day of feodality there was a tax on where your hearth was located. People would purposely build their house on the border between the terroritory of the French king and the German prince. This house would have two hearths. According to which tax-collector would come knocking they'd have only one of these hearths in use.