If you visit the Baarles (and Alastair Bonnett did) you wander the streets constantly wondering what country you’re in. Sometimes the sidewalk tells you. On many street corners, “the borders are marked, by white painted crosses on the pavement.”

But not all. That’s why some homes fly national flags, or have them affixed to their doorfronts. And still you can’t be sure: “On one 160-meter stretch of Kapelstraat, where visitors leave one large Belgian enclave only to pass through the borders of two nearby rectangular Belgium slivers, I was able to walk in a straight line across five international borders in a minute,” Bonnett writes.