Watch how 7 people illegally crossed a US-Canada border by driving across a shared lawn

nice! that’s a surprisingly functional joke

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Q: Can I use your bathroom?

A: Yes, but you’ll need a valid passport.

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Not exactly their brightest and best, eh?

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I’ve played a round of golf over the border.

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Are you implying Americans and Canadians are not potty trained???

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Clearly they are not sending their best.

Here’s another interesting border situation between Vermont and Quebec:

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*Laughs in Baarle :smiley: *

Of course this has been unimportant since 1948 and utterly moot since 1993, but still.

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This seems like the kind of thing that could get them barred from reentering the United States, or at least barred from taking adventure of visa-free entry in the future.

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In Europe, often the first way you realise you’ve crossed a national border, is when your phone pings to tell you you’re using a different network.

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And normmaly road signs are a bit different, and in a different language.

Or is it ‘young American beams with joy having escaped to civilisation’? [Ducks and runs for cover.]

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Until the coronavirus pandemic (apart from Baarle-Hertog being a place for Dutch people to get fireworks and cheap gas). There was the shop that closed off the aisles in Belgium, while the ones in the Netherlands stayed open- though border crossings were never restricted, residents were asked to only go to shops that were open in their own country.

I was there a few weeks ago, when the Netherlands were playing in the European Championship, and Belgian bars were allowed to show sports while Dutch ones weren’t. Of course, all the bars on the Belgian side were full of Dutch fans…

That can be a bit weird. Near me, there’s a Belgian road sign on Dutch territory, as the highway exit it is for is just over the border in Belgium. I’m not sure who maintains it.

As my grandfather would say…

If you’re going to the bathroom, you’re Russian.
If you’re walking out of the bathroom, you’re Finnish.

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What stops anyone from entering the library through one door and exiting through the other? Are there guards?

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darn cheese heads forgot to pave the road next to the church.

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I don’t give a crap. :wink:

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There is only one door, on the US side. Canadians may walk along the sidewalk around the building to that door, then return the same way. Traditionally this was on the honour system, more recently it’s on the don’t-want-to-get-shot system.

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For the Haskell library specifically, only the US entrance is available to pedestrians. To enter from Canada, you are escorted around to that side and then back again. Originally there were open doors on both sides and it was sorta honour-system that you went back out the way you came. Back when it was built, this was not a big deal.

For all the other folks scheming other ways to cross, you can all relax. The Canadian-US border is over 5500 miles long, almost entirely unguarded and largely unmarked. There are thousands of miles of open country where you can walk across a farmer’s field, if you want. All the road crossings are checkpointed because you can’t do much useful crime-wise without a car over these vast distances. But if you want to cross illegally, it ain’t hard. No pinch-zooming maps of the Haskell and gaming out schemes are required.

Americans’ expectations of borders seem to all derive from what’s happening on the other one.

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Any structure that straddles the border has a legal address on one side or the other. The “front door” was determined legally for each at some point and that dictates which country the building is in. I’m sure it gets interesting if you want to do a remodel. As for security, see my post above. TL;DR is that it doesn’t matter much.

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