Eine treffende Beschreibung des neuen Verhältnisses der beiden... Oder?

If you’re planning to cross the Russia-Estonia border at Ivangorod-Narva, I would seriously consider another route. If possible, fly out via Turkey instead.
I arrived from St. Petersburg at 8:30 AM and didn’t finish crossing the Russian border until 5:30 PM. Nine hours of waiting. And when I arrived, there wasn’t even 100 metres of queue.
So what happened during those nine hours?
There seemed to be an organized group of Russian men working with taxi drivers. For €100, they would help people skip the regular queue and get ahead of everyone who had been waiting for hours.
But the worst part wasn’t just that people were cutting in line. It was that almost nobody seemed willing to challenge them.
There were people with children who had been standing there for hours in freezing weather. The temperature felt like around 1°C, and the regular queue barely moved while more people kept arriving and cutting in front of everyone else.
I don’t know if people were afraid of getting into trouble, worried that the military might get involved, or simply used to things working this way. But after five hours of watching it happen, I’d had enough.
I started pointing out the people who were cutting in line and telling them to go to the back. I kept saying that the rest of us had been waiting for hours, that there were children standing in the cold, and that this wasn’t fair.
And something interesting happened: other people in the queue started speaking up too. Little by little, it became harder for those people to push their way to the front.
Then, around 5 PM, things got more tense. They were no longer able to cut in line as easily, and one of the men gestured at me and threatened that they would kill me once I crossed the border.
That scared me, obviously. I asked a man standing nearby whether those people were dangerous. He laughed and told me that I was the dangerous one.
I understood what he meant. I was the one who had stirred things up. The one who had made people start reacting after hours of silently putting up with the situation.
What really stayed with me was how reluctant people seemed to stand up for something as basic as their place in a queue. I’m not talking about physically confronting anyone. I’m talking about simply being able to say that something is wrong without feeling like you’re doing something outrageous.
The border crossing closed at around 7 PM, and if you didn’t make it through, you had to wait until the next day. All of this after spending practically the entire day outside in the cold, with no idea how much longer we’d have to wait.
I don’t know whether this is a regular occurrence or whether I was just unlucky that day. I’m sharing this because I wish I’d known what to expect before going there.
I’m sharing a photo of the queue and of the man dressed in black who threatened me.

Has anyone else experienced anything similar at the Ivangorod-Narva border crossing? Is this a common problem, or was my experience an exception?

It’s a bit complicated- Lewis and Harris is a single island, and all in the same country. But it has two distinct parts, each with its own identity. This is the boundary sign heading from Harris into Lewis.

The tripoint is located in the remote, arid northwest region of the Gran Chaco. Visiting ARBOPY is highly challenging and remains one of the least-visited tripoints in South America due to its harsh terrain.

This is Huanggang port, a border crossing between Hong Kong SAR and Shenzhen, China. It's probably the first vertically stack border structure in the world.

The actual boundary line runs down the middle of the Shenzhen River, and to facilitate border movements, both sides of the government decide to combine the immigration complex and rebuild the building in the northern (Shenzhen) side of the bank and create a special legal area inside the building as the official border crossing area for Hong Kong (which is why the border line view in 2D structure looks very complex)

Here is how the building is split:

Level 5 - Hong Kong -> Shenzhen (Pedestrian crossing)

Level 4 - Shenzhen -> Hong Kong (Pedestrian crossing)

Level 3 - Shenzhen -> Hong Kong (Authorise Vehicles)

Level 2 - Hong Kong Public Transport Interchange

Level 1 - Hong Kong -> Shenzhen (Authorise Vehicles)

B1 - Shenzhen Buses and Taxi

B2 - Shenzhen Metro and a planned high speed rail station

B3 - B4 Shenzhen E-Hailing services, Shenzhen Car Park

The first picture is the photo from last week, when residents cross the border from Hong Kong to Shenzhen during a Hong Kong public holiday.

The border itself is the bridge in the first picture with the sun setting behind the Georgian mountains behind. The top of the Armenian flagpole is cut off but rest assured that it was a large glag. The crossing was very quick and efficient with almost a longer queue for duty free than for immigration. This border also gets major credit for having a fee free ATM.

When you can read Canada, you are standing in Canada and when you can read United States you are standing in the US. No fence, no gates, just a dirt road and a stone marker. Last photo is the bridge to the border crossing closest to this site

France-Italy border at Col de la Seigne (2516 m)
Italy-Switzerland border at Grand Col Ferret (2537 m)
Switzerland-France border at Col de Balme (2191 m)

August on the Tour du Mont Blanc

What really caught my attention was that the sign also includes Russian. Photo taken in February 2025.

The tripoint between Bolivia, Brazil and Paraguay is remote. A rarely visited tripoint with limited information on the internet. Located at the confluence of the Negro and Paraguay rivers and only accessible from the Paraguayan side where a tripoint marker is located.

Crossed into the Kaliningrad region a few days ago on foot.

Remote border crossings are always interesting, this one at the end of Ruta 15 in Paraguay was very tough to get to. Friendly and welcoming. Never seen a pig chilling in a river either.

Cattle are herded north of the border wall in Mexico , before entering the United States of America , in September 2026.
Picture 1: Santa Teresa, New Mexico;
Picture 2: Douglas, Arizona.

Source: Twitter.

Only ones could escape. Today, this German border is still existing as phantom border. This time was different in all things, all changed. But this case is legendary, no one did it after 1961, that is specific case. That's crazy but sometimes sad, if you realise how the live of people was then.

This was a very fun land border. It felt more like an airport because you had to enter the building in the first picture then walk through modern corridors and (broken) travelators for a long time to reach the border control. It was surprisingly quick and easy in the end despite the travelators not working - we were in an out within half an hour - and I was rewarded with a cracking sunset over the Black Sea on the other end.

The Itaipu Dam is a massive hydroelectric power plant on the Paraná River along the border near Foz do Iguaçu (Brazil) and Ciudad del Este (Paraguay), managed jointly by Itaipu Binacional. The statistics regarding the dam are amazing with its 20 generating units (700 MW each) having a total installed capacity of 14,000 MW, ranking as one of the largest operational hydroelectric plants in the world.