Watched some eps of a documentary show on abandoned places last night. It's unsettling to see how many of them are associated with WWII, & with the Nazis in particular. Seeing that again & again really underscores how hard all of Europe was hit by WWII & all that came with it.
We don't have a clue in the US, really.
@Impious_Jade: Of course we don't. Along with Canada and Mexico, we're pretty geographically isolated from the rest of the planet. We're hard to get at militarily. That said, we have a lot of abandoned places, but most people never see them because those places aren't usually on interstates. More than one might think are in the boonies in the midwest, as in open ranges, and the deserts. The population of the US occupies not too much of its land mass.
@Impious_Jade: The abandoned places around Europe, ones in addition to the ones from the two World Wars, are something else as well. A friend from Germany years ago went all around Europe (Western and Eastern) and photographed loads of places and learned all kinds of things about them. Eventually lost track of them, alas. Their LJ blog posts about their travels were really cool, though.
@Impious_Jade: When I was on Malta back in 2005 I got lost one evening looking for a bus stop out in the country, and I was stranded for the night because I didn't realize I'd walked off the road and onto a private road. I spent the night under a tree that I found out in the morning that had grown out of Roman concrete. I slept on what remained of a small villa. I thought it was a shed. LOL
@thedisasterautist That sounds amazing, frankly! If a bit chilly...
On one trip to England I stayed the night in a 17th-century country church. It was awesome. No sound but the clock ticking away...
@Impious_Jade: It was in March. It got very chilly, yes. Thankfully it didn't rain as it had the day before and then did the following evening. That would've sucked.
@thedisasterautist Oh right on. Yeah last time I was in the UK we checked out an abbey that had been dismantled during Henry VIII's Dissolution. The signs of that are allll over England too.