Yeah. I know what you mean.
I once dug a hole 100 miles deep in my backyard, and I went 100 years back in time. Neither seemed all that impressive.
So, about 100 years ago, (give or take) there was this documentary with Bill Murray, and it was set in Pennsylvania, which is about 100 miles away from somewhere.
Phil dug a hole and found his brother Mario the plumber in Italy. (Or was it Spain? Seems like all stories end up in Spain.)
Save me.
I don’t suppose you read the post to which Miss Mapp was replying?
Any time relatives come to DC, they just want to see Fonzie’s jacket. I mean it, every. single. time. I just sit on a bench and point at the room, “it’s in there.” I’m always up for the Nationl Galleries East and West, but nope, just the jacket from the sitcom.
The vast majority of my relatives either grew up in the area, have lived here long enough, or visited often enough that they’ve seen everything already, so I’ve actually never had to do that.
I have one fairly large contingent of relatives out in LA, but my aunt who is the matriarch of that branch of the family grew up here and is the only one who ever comes back here to visit. If she were to bring any of her kids or grandkids back, she’d just show them around herself. I’ve never even met any of those cousins.
I grew up in NY, and while other states were close, the size of the country was no surprise. My daughter took several European boyfriends on cross-country road trips, and they had to be recalibrated in terms of how long it would take.
Here is California I know a number of people who have never been out of the state. That’s not something you ever see in the northeast.
Until recently I lived in a town in Germany that had medieval walls and a moat and stuff. It’s not a famous place - there are dozens, if not hundreds of towns in Germany with similar charm and history. But I used to like to amble around the moat and marvel at the fact that the walls I was walking past were there in the Middle Ages. Once upon a time long ago people looked upon those very walls who were dying of the bubonic plague; knights in armor would ride across those drawbridges and through those city gates; the lives of the peasants and merchants living in those houses were once dominated by priests and bishops and princes and kings. All that stuff actually happened right here - if any of the people from back in that time could time travel to the present day they could still recognize large chunks of the town.
The apartment I lived in was not nearly as old - at a guess, I would say 1880s or 1890s. It looked out on a main square and sometimes at night I would sit and think of all the history that was seen through those windows by inhabitants not too many generations before me. Some previous tenant of that very same apartment probably was waving flags outside the window cheering on the Kaiser’s troops in WWI; they probably saw the bedraggled veterans straggling back five years later. Then the hyperinflation hit - maybe the tenants before me used worthless Reichmarks for wallpaper, or let their kids use stacks of money as building blocks. Then the Nazis come along and maybe goosestepping military parades happened right through that square I’m looking out on - for all I know, a Nazi flag might have been hung from my very window. Could they see Jews rounded up and deported? Were their air raids when the war started turning against the Germans?
And on and on - you get the gist. It’s fascinating to think about!
Not uncommon for mrAru and I to decide to hit the outlet stores in Kittery Maine because we feel like a drive, a visit to the candy store to pick stuff up for people, and a visit to what was once a decent BBQ joint, and back again. It is all of a 3.5 hour drive and we always get up at 5 am anyways =) He was stationed there for a sub refit and we got to liking the area, and will head up in he off season for a quiet day or sometimes two if we don’t feel like driving back.
So we would do Connecticut, Massachusets, New Hampshire and Maine, and back.
We also frequently hit Vermont for King Arthur Flour or Ben and Jerries, and Rhodes Island for the all you can eat lobster.
We tend to get friends visiting who want to play tourist =) <you have no idea how many times I have been to the Submarine Museum and USS Nautilus sigh>
Dunno how I missed that one. I read the thread, honest! :smack:
I lived in Cairo for about five months. The place is pretty interesting: the Khan, the pyramids/sphinx, the museum, the Nile River, etc. A lot transpired there over the centuries. The novelty wore off as more visitors showed up; I came to loathe the pyramids and the relentless hucksters selling fake antiques. While I still find the history of the place fascinating, I don’t care if I ever return.
I’ve never been there, but from pictures it looks like the city has stretched right up to the pyramids. I understand why, but it’s funny how most pictures are from the city side, looking out to the desert, so it looks like they’re out in the middle of nowhere when in reality you’re just a short walk from modern civilization. Looking at it on Google Maps it looks like the city has arced around to the Western side the site and I’m guessing at some point it will be completely surrounded.
I grew up within walking distance of King Henry VIII’s palace, Hampton Court. I went there several times on school outings. Also not too far from London, which is full of stuff. I occasionally go and visit the Tower of London, or the Science Museum, or places like that.
Did you know that Americans think 100 years is a long time and Brits think 100 miles is a long distance?
And that’s why that kind of thing is SO fascinating to Americans; with the exception of a very few East Coast cities and areas, our history might date back to the first part of the 19th century.
I mean, if I sit on my back porch and think about what history happened near my house, I go back about 40 years, and it’s part of a farm. I go back about 90 years from there, and it’s wilderness. Somewhere in there, about 5-10 miles west, there were cattle drives going through the area. Before that, Native Americans roamed the area.
That’s it.
If I go to Galveston where a lot of my ancestors originally landed, history goes back to the 1500s when Cabeza de Vaca was wrecked on the island and enslaved by the Karankawas. Fast-forward 300 years, and a tiny European settlement was created on the island, and after a few years, a pirate colony began. Then the US Navy booted them, the city started to grow, a minor Civil War battle began, a hurricane hit, there were gangsters, and then in recent history, another couple hurricanes hit, and here we are. Most of the real history of the place is since 1820 or so.
Contrast that with say… some town in England, where it may have been founded in mesolithic times, populated by Beaker people later on, Celts, Romans, Saxons, Danes, Saxons again, Normans and English. That’s up through about 1200 or so… the next 600 years have the Magna Carta, Glorious Revolution, Industrial Revolution, Regency, multiple wars, Spanish Armada, etc… just to bring it up to the time when Galveston’s history began.
It’s kind of staggering to say… stand in St. Peter’s Square in Rome, and think that it’s been like that for 500 years, before that, there was ANOTHER older St. Peter’s, that had been there for over a thousand years, and before that, there was a Roman Circus there (chariot racing stadium) that had been on that spot for roughly 300 years, and nobody really knows what had been there before that, although the city itself is quite a bit older.
Seems like I’ve heard that somewhere recently too…
From the perspective of the US arising from the British colonies, though. Santa Fe was founded in 1610, three years after Jamestown.
I live near a civil war battlefield. Things aren’t too developed around here but there are plenty of other nearby sites that are endangered by development.
It doesn’t really affect my day-to-day life much, don’t see many tourists. I’ve seen more guys running metal detectors on fields in search of artifacts. But I’ve visited the graveyards and I hope to catch a glimpse of a ghost on the march sometime (I don’t believe in ghosts, but would still be cool.)
No, no, the old sewers in Spain are the ones in Saragossa. I’m reasonably sure they are not in Italy, but I can’t promise none of the plumbers involved was called Mario.
You see, a while back, they elected a female major. And one of the first things she tackled was the renovation of street lightning and of the city sewers, leading to jokes about “just like a woman, first thing she does is redecorate!”
Turns out that, while it was known that there hadn’t been anything but patching of said sewers in at least a century, some of the biggest tunnels were still Roman ones. The biggest one has been transformed into a museum. I understand it doesn’t smell like a sewer anymore, mind you.
Major jealousy here … I do historical recreation cooking and they have all sorts of interesting stuff going on in that area. I have a foodie hardon for Ivan Day[but in a good way…:o]
I live in a 2000 year old town. I can bike to visit a 5000 year old flint mine. We ve got a restaurant with a visitable Roman excavation in the basement. History is everywhere, and my town Maastricht is very good at combining the old with the new in a tasteful way.
I love it. It gives a calm sense of continuity, a security that in the end, most things ended well, or … ended, anyway.
I sit on a terrace enjoying a drink, and I know that i’m in a place where people have done that exact same thing for over 2000 years and will be doing for centuries more. And i’m confident that I probably do just as okay a job at it as all those other people.
And I have the (improvement of the) city in common with those past- and future people, so … I kind of like them already.