In the town of Baarle-Hertog, a bar can hit Dutch closing time and patrons simply carry their chairs a few feet across a line on the floor to keep drinking under Belgian law. This Flemish municipality in the province of Antwerp consists of 26 separate parcels, including 22 Belgian exclaves stranded inside the Dutch province of North Brabant, and inside those exclaves sit seven Dutch counter-exclaves.

This episode explains how 12th-century deals between the Lords of Breda and the Dukes of Brabant divided land by use rather than lines, why the 1843 Treaty of Maastricht accepted the mess instead of displacing families, and how nearly 3,000 residents cope today. It covers the front-door rule for a building's nationality, the house on Loveren Street whose door is split between two countries, the jointly run library, fireworks tourism, the surrea ...