As someone else introduced themselves, I thought I should also. My
name is Andrew Patton and I live near Washington DC. I work for a
consulting firm as a programmer and the majority of my time is spent
working on accounting software for various US federal government
agencies. I lived in Saudi Arabia for 5 year as a kid and got
interesting in borders when I travelled in Europe at that time. I was
particularly intrigued by such places as West Berlin and
Liechtenstein.

I am mainly interested in border curiosities such as enclaves/exclaves
and where various borders overlap (such as the real border of
Austria/Germany rests versus the customs border sits in Jungholtz). As
an example of my interest, I just received a copy of Honore Catudal's
book "The Exclave Program of Western Europe" which I plan to read
soon.

I am also interested in how people who live along or near a border
deal with it. Contrasting for example living near the border of East
Germany and West Germany about 10 years ago to the border between
Jordan an Saudi Arabia. One would require a great deal of effort to
cross the border in the former but need almost nothing to do so in the
later.

I am looking forward to see what the situation will be in EU in a few
months. With the Schengan agreement, crossing the borders currently is
a trivial task and with the introduction of the euro in January
another "barrier" will be lifted. Soon we should see residents of the
EU nations comparing prices of the same object in the same currency
but in different countries. While the prices should be the same, I
think there might be some surprises due to the different tax laws in
the various nations.

-Andrew

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Andrew T. Patton WWW: http://www.AndrewPatton.com
Fairfax, VA, USA E-Mail: usenet@...