Recognising borders

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Post originally by Jethrow at 2005-09-09 00:37:36
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I am lucky, living in Australia, as our country takes up our whole continent and all our borders are in the ocean. As well, State boundaries have virtually no physical demarcations other than border quarantine posts (with the obvious exception of Tasmania which is an island-State). Huge tracts of Aust are flat and arid, with hardly any geographical or ecological landmarks to provide some clue as to where a person is.
I live in Perth, the capitol of the State of Western Australia, and if I drive 350km east I hit the Nullarbor Plain, a completely flat treeless desert more than 1000km wide. The same distance N or NW brings me to the edge of arid country that eventually turns into one of the world's most inhospitable regions, covering more than a quarter of the continent.
I understand that large parts of Russia, Canada and East Asia are similarly uniform over vast distances. It must be much easier to recognise an approaching border when the border is a physical barrier such as a big river, or as is the case in some places, a fence, wall or demilitarized zone.

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Post originally by Torben Mogensen at 2005-09-09 01:20:55
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In Europe, some borders are natural but others are just politically created. When crossing one of the latter ones, the most obvious difference is usually a different style and language for road signs.

Sometimes, you will also notice a difference in building styles -- the shape of roofs or the colours used for walls. And, of course, once you begin talking to people, the language differences are very obvious, and when you go to shops and restaurants, the selection of food and goods is subtly different (though you'll find McDonalds everywhere).

It gets a bit different when moving from Western European countries to the former east block countries. Due to the prolonged separation, building styles etc. is much different, though not as much as it used to be -- 15 years ago, you would almost exclusievly find east block cars and shops with a very limited selection of goods, but these days you see as many Toyotas and BMWs in Eastern Europe as you do in the west, and you get almost the same goods as in the west. In another ten years, I expect the difference will be as small as when moving between Western European countries. Also, due to increasing internationalisation of trade, the differences in goods will decrease, so the main visible difference will be in language and the parts of culture that relate to language.

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Post originally by Jethrow at 2005-09-09 01:34:10
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I had heard this about borders with former Eastern Bloc cocuntries. A friend travelled from Germany into Poland last year and said that while parts of East Germany were architecturally distinct from West Germany, things just seemed very shabby on the Poland side of the border.
Of course, in Australia there are distinct architectural differences between regions, but these tend to be socio-economic and ethnic in nature. For instance, while Australia is a prosperous and developed nation, it has historically treated its indigenous peoples very poorly, and a visitor to Australian Aboriginal communities in the far north of the continent could be forgiven for assuming they had left Australia and entered some third world country.
Aboriginal communities commonly suffer from chronic shortages of adequate housing and utilities, almost universal unemployment, substance abuse, poor diets, chronic (curable) disease problems, regular antisocial behaviour, disappearing cultural and language knowledge, high rates of infant mortality, and life expectancies 20 or more years lower on average than non-indigenous Australians.
A very sad situation indeed.

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Post originally by Rob Carriere at 2005-09-09 01:53:16
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I remember from when I was a small child that crossing the Dutch-Belgian border involved getting stopped, showing your passports, and answering a couple of questions. Sort of like crossing the US-Canadian border. Then the questions went away. A couple of years later, they switched to just sampling cars for passports and waving the rest on. In another couple of years, they were waving everybody on. It actually took more than a few years before they admitted they might as well not man the border posts, and still more years before they removed the empty buildings sitting in the middle of the road. Today, there's the customs areas for freight traffic, a sign saying "welcome to Belgium", another sign reminding you of the speed limits in Belgium, and that's it. And that's assuming you're crossing the border on a major highway. Small roads might or might not have a sign at the border.

Still, that border does have an effect. Near where I live there's a small enclave of Belgium completely surrounded by Dutch territory. Because of a loop hole in Belgian law, this means that all the stores in this bit of Belgium can open on Sunday. Their Dutch counterparts cannot. As you might imagine, the place does a rousing business every Sunday...
Before the euro, most people who lived there walked around with two wallets, one for Dutch guilders and one for Belgian francs.

Oh, yes, and there's tourist bike trail that follows the old smuggling routes.

SR
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Post originally by Jethrow at 2005-09-09 01:55:34
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Tourist bike trail following the old smuggling routes? That sounds cool!

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Post originally by Rob Carriere at 2005-09-09 03:19:32
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I think you'd need water bikes around where you live, though... :-)
SR
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