One Cafe, Two Countries

There is a cafe in the small town of Baarle where your coffee sits in one country and your slice of cake in another. The town straddles the border between Belgium and the Netherlands, and unlike most borders, this one refuses to politely detour around anyone's house. Instead, it cuts straight through them, marked by white crosses and metal studs that run along the streets, across doorsteps, beneath shop shelves, and directly under cafe tables.

The explanation is centuries old. Local lords once traded and gifted parcels of land much as children trade cards, and the result is a town stitched together from mismatched patches. Small islands of Belgian territory sit scattered inside the Netherlands, and, in a further twist, tinier islands of Dutch land sit inside some of those Belgian ones. Nobody ever bothered to tidy the arrangement up, so the border has simply persisted, zigzagging its way through everyday life ever since.

The town has long since made peace with its own strangeness. The rule for houses is straightforward enough: whichever country your front door opens into is the country you live in, although a few houses, having two doors, technically carry two addresses. At the cafe, you can hold your cup in one country and set it down in the other, which makes it, quite possibly, the only place on earth where you can leave the country simply by passing the sugar.