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Comment by dark__paladin | Hacker News Reader

As an American the thought of multiple other countries being within driving distance is completely foreign and bizarre to me. I have to drive 3 hours to see family and I don't even leave the state.

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I think that's mainly just a odd thing about the US and Canada - other, sometimes larger, countries have many places where you could easily access multiple other countries.

China (larger than the US but smaller than Canada) has 16 tripoints and Russia (larger than the US and Canada) has at least 11 tripoints:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tripoint

edit: I misread the list of countries by area on Wikipedia - US is slightly larger than China....

Or any island country, which is most countries in South-East Asia and Oceania.

I assume you're referring to the contiguous 48 states, because the total land mass of the USA is 2% larger than China, not smaller.

Thanks for the correction - I wasn't particularly careful looking at the list on Wikpedia:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_and_dependen...

You were actually correct. See note [e] in that table.

This is incorrect. China's landmass is larger than the US (including Alaska). The US is only larger if you include coastal and territorial waters, clearly not landmass area.

On the other hand, the USA has a semi-enclave, which is rather unusual; you have to cross Canada if you want to get from Washington to Alaska by land. Russia has Kaliningrad but that's not quite on the same scale. From a British perspective, though, these distinctions are rather hard to make - Britain has between the largest number of semi-enclaves in the world and none, depending on how you count the many former imperial territories.

Nitpick, I think you mean exclave

FWIW those tripoints in China are mostly very far away from population centers. If Mexico was 10 countries it would still take GP 3 hours to drive to family and not leave the state.

It was so exciting as a young kid being driven on to a train, travelling under the sea, then in 30 minutes being in a different a totally different country - France - with a different language, time zone, currency, etc! It even smelled totally different.

Then continuing the journey around Europe, there were even more currencies and more languages and different cuisines.

Ah the nostalgia!

I know how you feel. As an European living in Beijing, China, it really blows my mind that, depending on where I go within the city, it can take me a 3h drive here. Not even talking about remote rural areas or state/province distances...

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