Skip to main content

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

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Advent Calendar 2025

1st December 2025

Hello! We've sort of lost count, but think the first Advent Calendar was back in 2003, the Internet Archive Wayback Machine says it looked like this: Of course all the links are dead, but the thing it has in common with this year's is that it is still coded in HTML, probably the last thing I will ever rely on coding for. Now it looks like this: Happy Advent! We have gone for the Bonne Maman JAM Calendar again this year, after leaving it too late last year and it selling out at both Fenwick and Selfridges! We get a fresh pot of jam every day to enjoy with our tartines and Ovomaltines. We also have the Domino's "Merry Crustmas" leaflet, and a MUJI calendar we'll show you later in the month. Do let us know what you are opening every day! You can leave a message below, or email us your ideas and suggestions for future days at robotmaths@outlook.com Have a great day!