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3rd December 2016

We hope you recovered from watching the Andre Rieu video yesterday. If you want to see it again just click on https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VUKEOwM0F4s

On our holidays we travelled from Maastricht in the Netherlands to Brussel in Belgium, which brings us to the Word Of The Day:

non-contiguous



Belgium is about to get smaller and the Netherlands bigger after the countries agreed to a swap of land. Each will cede small, uninhabited parcels of land to reflect a change in course of what is known in French as the river Meuse, and in Dutch as the Maas. The border will most likely change at the start of 2018 after both countries have ratified a treaty next week. The land swap, however, does not extend to the border village of Baarle-Hertog, aka Baarle-Nassau, which has non-contiguous part of the Netherlands in Belgium, and vice versa.

Yes, there's a Belgian village in the middle of the Netherlands, but just to make it extra confusing there are small areas of Dutch land in the middle of the village. You can see them marked N1, N2, etc in the map above. These distributions were ratified and clarified as a part of the borderline settlements arrived at in the Maastricht Treaty. No, not that one, the Treaty of Maastricht in 1843.

Read more about the enclaves at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baarle-Hertog

Here's a photo of the smallest one (H22):


Update: this great article

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