Photos from the "old days"

Looks like my old neighborhood, ha.

Hundreds of thousands of small towns in many of those European countries look exactly the same.
 
All you're missing is laundry hanging off the balconies.

Surprised that building is mostly one color. Usually they're half one color and half another.
 
NorBro said:
Looks like my old neighborhood, ha.

Hundreds of thousands of small towns in many of those European countries look exactly the same.
Click to expand...

Last night I was trying to find a video of a bus ride to our summer village. It was uploaded sometime around 2012 but since deleted. Darn.

So, I was looking through some other clips. Disappointingly, there is very little available. But I would stumble on a clip from some Lithuanian guy looking to buy an inexpensive summer cabin in Belarus (they're available for less than $10,000). So, he is driving through a village very similar to the Wikipedia photo and then some other guy says, "These are very similar to the Polish style". And some other guy added, "Yup, they're all the same".

Then it dawned on me that the 1919 treaty of Brest-Litovsk between the USSR and the Central Powers ceded large portions of Belarus and all of Poland, as if it were one nation, to the Germans. In fact, my grandmothers two younger sisters and a brother emigrated officially from Poland (to Palestine) in 1926 even though they had not moved from their previous hometown of Novogrudok. So, it really was one continuous lot.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Navahrudak
 
ha, it's crazy. But you can say that about a lot of things.

P.S. You ever see this movie/clip?

 
Some probably don't know most of those buildings don't have elevators (some might), so you have to walk up and down the old-fashioned way.

I'm more familiar with 5 stories (like in the video clip/your pic above it), which definitely don't.
 
That's the reason Khrushchev stole the 5-story design from the French (Raymond Camus, post-war reconstruction of Le Havre). No elevators. No garbage chute either.

We lived on the 2nd floor.

A few years ago, I reconnected with my ex-neighbors. Some are on Facebook, others are on the Russian Classmates. They took photos of our old building. It's kind of same old, same old, except home furnishings are modern. The building itself was restored pretty well. They weren't meant to last more than 25 years. And that was 60 years ago!

PS. I live on the 5th floor now and I try to take the stairs (unless I am carrying groceries).
 
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In the USSR, an electric bus with the overhead cables was quite ubiquitous, if not pretty. Apparently, Moscow retired the last of their fleet and switched to diesel. Here's a version from the 1970's-80's.

377.jpg

http://busglobe.com/images/377.jpg

The one below is from the 1960's and 70's.
 

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DLD said:
In the USSR, an electric bus with the overhead cables was quite ubiquitous, if not pretty. Apparently, Moscow retired the last of their fleet and switched to diesel. Here's a version from the 1970's-80's.

View attachment 140344

http://busglobe.com/images/377.jpg

The one below is from the 1960's and 70's.
Click to expand...

We had those electric buses. I took the bus every weekday across town. Every day the bus would come to a turn as it was going to go under a low underpass. Every single day the rod that reaches up to the wire would come off the wire at the turn. The bus would stop. The driver got out and pulled on the rope to bring the pole down and set it back on the wire. Then he would get back in the bus and off we would go. They never fixed it.
 
NorBro said:
Do you think that's Kompot on that tray?
Click to expand...

Surely looks like it. A Prix Fixe meal at our high school was 35 kopecks - a bowl of soup, a "chicken" cutlet with a side of mashed potatoes and kompot for dessert. I don't recall if I had ever bought a full meal after the 4th grade (spent 2nd-4th in a fairly typical for that era pre-school-in-school system). My mom walked home during her lunch hour, as her lunch hour was a tad "flexible". But dad ate in one every day. He never brown-bagged it.

In our cafeteria, I usually bought these. I think they were 8 kopecks.

74e2ccb0c733cde2b71c8d02a184eb25.jpg
 
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