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Private Notes
Schengen is a small town in Luxembourg, on the borders with France and Germany. But one of those borders is a little more complicated: the Mosel (or Moselle) river is a condominium, it belongs to both countries at the same time. And thus, so the bridges above it.
I'm not 100% happy with the research in this video, because it was put together quickly and, through necessity of language, from English-speaking secondary sources. However, Frank Jacobs in the New York Times on condominiums, talks about the history of the treaties: https://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com...
and that's confirmed by a reference in Freshwater Boundaries Revisited: Recent Developments in International River Law by María Querol, which quotes Bernhardt's Encyclopedia of Public International Law, Vol 111, p465.
Interestingly, the borders on Google Maps, Bing Maps and OpenStreetMap all take different (and sometimes nonsensical) twists and turns, so I've chosen to illustrate the simplest example.
About once a year, on the Oosterscheldekering barrier in the south of the Netherlands, there is NK Tegenwindfietsen: a bicycle race cycling into a headwind. This year it was 120km/h: this is why it's so difficult, and also why it's so brilliant.
From March 1st 2020, Luxembourg will have free public transit throughout the country: you'll be able to travel on buses, trains, trams, and that one funicular railway without a ticket. It sounds like a good idea: but is it?
Zwentendorf Nuclear Power Plant, in Austria, was ready to go: it just needed starting up. But that never happened, and forty years later, it still sits mothballed. Here's why.
In the Abbey Gardens of Bury St Edmunds, in a quiet corner of a park, sits the World's First Internet Bench. Well, sort of. It's been nearly twenty years, and it's arguable whether it ever did the job in the first place...
Old Sarum, in Wiltshire, is a now-desolate hillfort run by English Heritage. But it was once one of the most important sites in southern England: so important that it had two members of Parliament. Then, it became a "rotten borough": and a warning about power.
Kolbeinsey is the most northern part of Iceland, a tiny island that, according to Wikipedia, is due to disappear due to wave erosion "probably around the year 2020". Which raised an obvious question: is it still there?
Silfra, in Þingvellir National Park in Iceland, is where the Eurasian and North American continental plates are dividing. It's a crack in the earth where you can snorkel or dive between the continents. Well, sort of. As ever, it's a bit more complicated than that.
Wunderland Kalkar, near the German-Dutch border, is a family amusement park... inside a nuclear power plant that was never turned on.
The Ruhr Valley, in north-west Germany, is an industrial coal-mining area. And because of that kilometre-deep mining, parts of it have sunk, the drainage patterns have changed: and now, if the pumps of Emschergenossenschaft ever stop, quite a few towns and cities will end up flooded.
The Broomway is surrounded on both sides by quicksand and deep, sucking mud. It has no markers and no guideposts. And if you mistime your walk, you won't outrun the tide. Oh, and it's in the middle of a Ministry of Defence firing range. But most of the time, if you want to visit Foulness Island, it's the only way.
There are lots of disused and never-used roads and bridges in the world. But the Road to Nowhere in Yate, in south-west England, does still sometimes have traffic driving on it. And crashing on it.
