Saturday, February 5, 2011

so so O L D

I wonder just how old this place is. In most {I'd almost venture to guess all} US cities or even smaller towns, you can drive around and know immediately when you get to a bad area. The houses are run down, the yards are unkept and it just looks old. These areas are easy to spot. Here, I haven't seen a village that doesn't look old. It all looks so, so old. That doesn't mean that it all looks run down, just old. In our village alone, I couldn't tell you where the nice part is. Someone mentioned that it might be a WWII mentality here that they didn't want the outsides of their houses to look nice in hopes that they would be spared and left alone. There are larger and smaller homes, but it all kind of looks the same. Everyone, well not everyone but the ones who know where it actually is have commented to us that Oberstaufenbach {our village} is a nice village- lots of families with lots of kids. Driving through, we would have never guessed it to be a nice village. The more we're here and the more we drive around we are realizing most villages look the same with lots of old in each of them.
There are horses {two different sets} quite close to us that Caden loves to look at. On a recent walk to see the horses, we even noticed that some houses have attached barns. Horses, cows- doesn't matter. ATTACHED- not next to it, but connected- as in sharing a wall. So strange; so old. As much as anyone loves their horses or livestock, I can't image any new house going up today with plans of an attached barn. Garages are meant to be attached, but barns with stalls?

Below are a couple houses {in our nice village} just down the street from us I caught on our walk along with a little boy who {once again} didn't want his picture taken.  I probably should have used a synonym for old... aged, mature, elderly... I just can't think of a better word to describe this place.

1 comment:

Carinne said...

I remember the first time I went to Europe, it was 8th grade and we were in England. There were 2 streets in London, one named "Old _____" and one named "New ______" (I can't remember the actual name). Someone told us the "New" street was built in like the 1600's. It really cracked us up. Everything in Europe is just so old and being in the US, we're just not used to it.