Google Sightseeing » Romania

Complicated borders

Alex Turnbull — Fri, 12 Dec 2008 15:29:43 +0000

Here’s a fairly long train travelling through an icy Moldova, eastern Europe. A train is hardly an uncommon sight on Google Earth – but this particular train will travel from one side of Moldova all the way to the other in an incredible two minutes flat.

The train has just left neighbouring Romania and is passing through Moldova on its way to Ukraine… but as you may have guessed by now, this train passes through Moldova at the exact point where the three countries meet. If the train had been just a little longer, it could have actually straddled all three countries at the same time!

Elsewhere in Europe, we find the Belgian town of Baarle-Hertog – which is in the Netherlands.

Baarle-Hertog is made up of twenty separate Belgian exclaves in the Netherlands, and three other pieces on the Dutch-Belgian border. Even more confusingly, there are also seven Dutch exclaves within the Belgian exclaves!

The Dutch parts of the town are called Baarle-Nassau, and the border is so complicated that there are some houses that are divided between the two countries. Allegedly there was once a Dutch law which required restaurants to close earlier than those in Belgium, which for some restaurants simply meant that the clients had to move tables to the Belgian side.

Read more about Moldova, Baarle-Hertog and Baarle-Nassau at Wikipedia. BLDG blog also has an excellent article about Baarle-Hertog.

Thanks to Eric Hagerman and Nev Stokes.

Locations: Belgium, Moldova, Netherlands, Romania, Ukraine / Categories: Buildings, Other Vehicles

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Aliens Invade Romania

Alex Turnbull — Mon, 24 Sep 2007 21:59:41 +0000

I think no-one can doubt that aliens have definitely landed!

Both of these spacecraft are located in farmland outside the Romanian city of Timisoara. Romania is not known as a major UFO hotspot, but to our alien overlords Roswell is probably passé¹.

That said, this isn’t the first sighting of our visitors to Romania: the Romanian UFO Network² have hundreds of blurry pictures of similar looking craft (or clouds).

So, UFO sceptics, do you have another explanation of what we’re seeing here?

Thanks to tomhet4ever, DocMartini & kjfitz.

Google Earth Blog has a time-lapse placemark of UFO sightings across the globe since 1944, and they’re almost all in the US. ↩
Unfortunately, the automatic translation of the site makes less sense to me than the Romanian. ↩

Locations: Romania / Categories: Spacecraft, Weirdness

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Large Buildings

James Turnbull — Mon, 11 Dec 2006 21:59:34 +0000

The Palace of the Parliament in Romania has a floor area of 350,000 m² which makes it one of the world’s largest buildings. Previously called the “House of the People” under communism it also narrowly misses the top spot of “largest government building in the world” behind The Pentagon.

It has taken the top spot in one category though – it’s the world’s heaviest building! Hang on, how on earth do you measure the world’s heaviest building?

South Korea’s Lotte World is not hard to spot, and is officially the world’s largest indoor theme park. So big in fact that a large part of it is outdoors on Magic Island to the South.

Thanks: Kjerstin & The Bobs

Locations: Romania, South Korea / Categories: Buildings, Large Type, Theme Parks

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