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Top-level
 4/ Germany 🇩🇪 has one exclave, the city of Büsingen am Hochrhein is entirely surrounded by Switzerland🇨🇭 For time zone nerds: tiny Büsingen (pop. ~1,500) has it's own entry in the IANA timezone database: 9 comments
6/ Today Germany 🇩🇪 is in political union with its EU 🇪🇺neighbors (except Switzerland🇨🇭, of course), but there is still one border dispute with the Netherlands 🇳🇱 about the course of the border at the mouth of the Ems river, as covered in our thread on border disputes. 7/ This year will mark 33 years since reunification, when East joined West. Much less well known is the "mini-reunification" when the Saar protectorate rejoined Germany. Following WWII it was a separate legal entity until 1957 (with own Olympics team) 8/ In 2016 it was discovered that Germany's borders had changed. Due to the shift of a river, Germany gained about 500 sqm in a remote forest from the Czech Republic 🇨🇿 https://bigthink.com/strange-maps/germany-just-got-a-bit-bigger/ 9/ You may be surprised to learn of the part of Germany 🇩🇪 that was once British 🇬🇧. The North Sea island of Helgoland belonged to Britain until 1890 when it was traded for Zanzibar (Now Tanzania 🇹🇿, then part of German East Africa) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heligoland%E2%80%93Zanzibar_Treaty 10/ That's it for our look at the #geoweirdness of Germany 🇩🇪 We have more threads about specific countries, geocoding, etc on our blog. 11/ Bonus #geoweirdness tweet - post reunification Germany 🇩🇪 has 16 Bundesländer (states). Occasionally though you will hear of the "17th Bundesland", a reference to favorite German tourism destination: the 🇪🇸 Spanish island of Mallorca 12/ Final bonus #geoweirdness tweet - here's a map of Germany 🇩🇪 if the place names were given English naming equivalents.  |
Gregory's Server
5/ Germany 🇩🇪 contains one "pene-exclave" (practical exclave). Due to mountains the Austrian 🇦🇹 village of Jungholz can only practically be reached via German roads. The village has both German and Austrian postal codes.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jungholz
#geoweirdness