Sinking ship

when i took this photo a few weeks back i didnt want to post it, since its so grey. but currently the weather is like this.... or its raining. beeehhh!

the amsterdam canals are filled with little boats. somehow tim got the impression that you can put your boat anywhere for free (and he kept saying, i want a boat too!!), but thats not the case. just like for your car, you have to pay to park your boat. i read somewhere 30 euros per meter of boat (but im not sure). anyways, its not free, and if you do park your boat without paying, they can tow it, just like your car. they also periodically remove boats that look like the one above, so after heavy rain etc you should definitely check whether your boat still looks fine...

as for the leak in the apartment; someone was supposed to come today. and then didnt... they were swamped taking care of apartments with leaks much worse than ours. today it rained, but luckily not inside. its not sure yet when the will come, but i hope it wont take too long....

Two weeks

last sunday we parked the truck next to a row of cars that had been standing there for a very long time. including the one above. all cars that when fixed up, would be so impressive! but now they were just standing there, a little sad. tires empty and falling apart, rust everywhere..... it was funny how i was very much aware that for at least a while "our" car would be standing there too, unused. i wondered when and how these cars were left, if the owners ever come back, whether they are at least planning to come back, some day.... i couldnt get the safety belt perfectly straight from the passengers seat, and somehow that seemed very important. we also left a tin with some candy in it. candy that you can keep forever, so thats fine. i guess it was a bit on purpose, although it is very likely that tim didnt think about it for one second, while i am now writing a blog post about it, hahahaha.

the next day i brought tim to the airport. and everything we did that day, breakfast, swimming, going down with the suitcases, locking the door, taking the subway, would be the last time here together. again, tim was most likely just thinking about his flight and his new job starting in just 2 days, but i tried to remember every moment. even though we did all those things so often, and i never thought about it! (and its not like we will never visit the us again; theres still so much to see!)

and now there are only 2 weeks left before i will leave as well..... the kitchen is still so full with stuff (quite some food and we hardly packed any kitchen ware). will all my clothes (and the ones i bought on top of that during a 6.5 hour shopping spree yesterday) fit in my suitcases? what do i still need to do? what stuff still needs to be arranged? (change of address, cancelling subscriptions, my bank account, etc etc). and sometimes i remember an item, and am not sure whether i brought it to goodwill or packed for shipping. more often than not i hope that i packed it..... i guess (i hope) when we get our boxes in amsterdam, it will be kind of like presents on christmas....

Tree face

today we went out exploring for a bit. someone had carved a face in a dead tree.... i hadnt seen it at first, but then i did, and it was a little scary... especially given the location.. (an abandoned state hospital, closed since 2003; you can visit the grounds during the day, but all the buildings are boarded up and nature is slowly overgrowing everything. some other time i should post some more pics!)

Forgotten car

i showed you pictures of this place before. it was somewhere along the road in florida, dec 2011. several cars were standing around at various levels of decay.... 

here in boston we had some snow today, but nothing that remained on the ground. we do still have mountains of snow alongside the roads; they arent very pretty and white anymore, as you can imagine...

More holiday!

after 2 days of boston i thought i could show another holiday photo! ;)

this was on dec 31st, when we drive through quite some snow. here we drove through a tiny town; there were just a few houses, it was around 7000 feet, and of the few buildings that were there, several were clearly abandoned. the above looked cool, but also didnt really seem to belong to something anymore... 

in boston its unusually warm for the time of the year, whereas its quite cold in the other part of the country!

i wouldnt mind getting some snow... but well, that doesnt seem to happen anytime soon....

Overgrown car

noooo... this is not in the netherlands, i dont think you would see much of this there.... 

this was a few weekends back, when we were in vermont. there were actually several in a row, i think they were collecting them!

Abandoned car

at this specific spot somewhere in florida (where we were last december) some 4 or 5 of these cars were randomly standing around, waiting to be overgrown, i guess... it was so weird! but fascinating too...

Thats trash!!

i dont know, but im getting more and more annoyed by the hundreds of cups i see left here and there and everywhere!! theyre usually still half full at least. and its usually this gross watered down ice-coffee with lots and lots of sugar and milk. beeehhh. this morning on either side someone came to sit next to me with a cup of "something" in their hands. and it never smells like a good cup of freshly brewed REAL coffee! no, it smells sweet. beeehhh!!! why cant they just drink a normal black coffee, like grownups in the rest of the world? why does it have to come through a straw? really, i never saw more adults suck on straws than in the us of a... and ofcourse, in the other hand is a phone...

and when they are done with their far too huge cup (really, a small coffee would still be considered large or extra large in the netherlands...), they just put it wherever they happen to be at that very moment. done? lets put it down. i dont care anymore. 

it really annoys me. find a trashcan, please! carry it until you encounter one. while drinking from it it also wasnt a problem to carry it around, so just do that a little longer... pfew. that was nice. but really, i hate it!! i decided to do a little project; every time i see an abandoned cup i need to take a picture of it. dont know yet what i will do with them, perhaps a set on flickr..... :) so this will be photo umber 2. here you can see number one...

Luxury & convenience

in danvers, which is not too far from our home, used to be an enormous building on a hill, rather isolated from the rest of the town. its roofline, with many sharp angles and spires, is visible from the highway. part of the building you can see above, as we visited it last month....

the evening before our visit we watched the horrormovie session 9, filmed when this building had been abandoned for some years. the plot; a group of men, hired to remove asbestos from the building after it has been abandoned for some time, seem not to get along, and it ends with the crew getting murdered one by one in the creepy hallways. in the movie, but also in reality, this used to be the danvers state hospital. built between 1874 and 1878, and also named "danvers state insane asylum". the movie was disappointing (although it did scare me, but more of what i imagined i was going to see than what i actually did see...); i expected creepy, but beautiful abandoned hallways that had been subject to years of neglect.  instead, most of the shots of the place were pretty bad. they had access to this building and could film anything they wanted, and they.... just... failed... :(

officially the hospital closed in 1992, and was left abandoned until 2005, when an apartment company bought the property and destroyed most of the original buildings, much to the dismay of many people (there was even a lawsuit, but they wanted and were allowed to demolish it as it was too expensive to renovate all of the buildings). at least they renovated the part above... now its the avalon apartments in danvers. everything new, everything fancy. i guess this company likes to buy abandoned psychiatric hospitals, as they also converted the hospital grounds i showed you recently into apartment complexes. i was somehow nervous when we went there. i really wanted to see what they made of the building, but i also thought it creepy that what once was a place everyone wanted to stay away from now was a "luxury" place to live, complete with basketball court, pool, gym, kids playground...  we pretended to look for an apartment and got a tour in the above building. gone was the feeling of creepiness! it was beautiful. yes, just like in our apartment complex the appliances were cheap, but the building structure was not, beautiful bay windows, high ceilings, lots of space. hadnt it been in the middle of nowhere, we would even considered moving there! (with a rent significantly lower than our current place).

tomorrow i will show you another picture, and a set i will post on flickr....

Driving.... driving...

today we got up early. and then drove. and drove some more. and even more... 

it was amazing. beautiful, ugly, sad, abandoned, funny, scary, impressive..... and then we arrived in san diego and are staying for the weekend with our friend sylvia!!

i guess i have a picture (many, actually) going with each adjective. but not now... time for bed!

Person P46

yesterday i showed you a picture of the last remaining building of the metropolitan state hospital in waltham, which closed in 1992. we were there the last weekend of april. one evening, when i planned to post a picture of it here, and i was looking up some info on the history of the hospital, i stumbled upon a blog that showed its cemetery! cemetery?! we had walked around the grounds quite a bit, but we didnt see a cemetery.... but the mere fact that there was a cemetery associated with the hospital meant that we had to go back and find it, which is what we did last saturday.... even with the directions printed, we had a hard time finding it, we went wrong twice (really, really wrong), before we finally found it; the metfern cemetery. its almost 3/4 of a mile away from the hospital grounds, in the middle of the woods...
above you see one of the "gravestones". P 46. thats it. thats the grave for a person. no name. just a number, and either a P or a C in front of it. P meaning the person was protestant, and a C for Catholic. they were separated on either side of the grassy field (more pics here on my flickr account). some of the markers were toppled over, some were overgrown and others were unreadable. imagine that. you die in a psychiatric hospital, and then you are buried as a number. in fact, between 1880 and 1946 people from the metropolitan state hospital and the fernald school (an institution for people with developmental disabilities) were buried at the mount feake cemetery without ANY individual marker, so this individual number can be seen as an "improvement", which is how they buried their patients from 1949-1979; approximately 300 patients are buried here like this. my questions; why did this occur at another, their own, cemetery? and what happened after 1979? are there any records of the names of the people belonging to these numbers?! 1979 is not that long ago; did they really think this was the way to do it, even just 30 years ago?!! (this is just a subset of my questions...)

as you can see in my set on flickr, it is now sort of clear that that open spot in the middle of the woods is a cemetery, but that didnt seem to be the case originally as you can see here in a picture taken in 2004. moreover, when construction began for the fancy apartments that replaced the hospital, workers were unaware of the cemetery and made part of it a road to be used for heavy construction equipment.... 

im glad there are many blogs etc swimming around on the internet, telling us about these cemeteries (there are more, and i will use another tuesday to show you), so that they still will be visited from time to time.....

for more taphophilia, go here!

Psychiatric hospital

2 weeks back we went to waltham. for a certain supermarket. as i thought it was too much of a drive for just a supermarket (some 30 minutes), i googled around a bit to see whether there is anything interesting to see in waltham. i then found that the above building is on the "national register of historic places" AND is abandoned... so i had to check that out. well... it used to be the administration building of the metropolitan state hospital, built in 1927. built as an enormous complex, with many different buildings on 330 acres of land, it housed the mentally ill. in 1992, it closed, in line with the state's policy to close mental hospitals to cut costs and to move patients into private care. this hospital is located in a rural area, with lots of woods around it. there is not much to be found on wikipedia about it, aside from the sad story that one patient murdered another in 1978, and kept several of her teeth as a souvenir. some other sites mention the place is haunted, since the patients were treated very badly, often.

here you can see how huge the complex was. underground all those buildings were connected by tunnels, so that staff and patients could get to other buildings easily during winter, etc. in 2007, all those buildings were demolished and an apartment complex was built. i think i read somewhere that they did use the foundations for some of the buildings. now you can live on the grounds of a former psychiatric hospital for "just" 1800 dollars a month (1-bedroom). 

i dont understand why they left the building like this. if it is a building of "historic interest", why do they leave it all boarded up? the entrance full of graffiti? it makes its sad past even worse, i think...

if interested in some pictures from the insides of the buildings in abandoned state, click here, and tomorrow i will show you some more pictures of this place.

Abandoned swings

as you can see, these swings have not been used in a long time.... yesterday we saw many of them.... the grass so high around them. i also learned something; when exploring in such high weeds with bare legs, they get itchy... but it was soooo hot this weekend!!

i will tell you more about the place where we saw these swings another time; im still reading about it and trying to figure it all out.... now first some sleep!

The Keys

i really wanted to see the keys. we went on the last day of our holiday, the first day of 2012. route 1 leads you from island to island over 42 (!) bridges, until you are in key west, 129 miles from miami. somehow i had an image in my mind of this chain of islands, surrounded by perfect beaches and blue water, nature, and no people. we would be some kind of explorers... entering these perfect untouched islands. how wrong could i be? and how stupid! of course its not like that! they keys are what they are because of tourists like me, "who want to see the keys".... and i guess people living there also just like to go to the supermarket... :D i must admit, it was even quite ugly at times... just a us highway, with fast food chains, and other superstores alongside it.... i really thought we would not see that here, these were islands after all! well, perhaps it was like that before they were only accessible by water, which was until 1910, when the overseas railway was completed. nowadays, tourism is the main business, which is clear from the many h/motels along the (mostly) single lane highway. traffic thus can be slow, but when we went it was ok (aside from some crazy drivers when we went back. one of them a tourbus... yuk). 

just like all the other places we drove through, there were abandoned places... this one in front of the airport. this building was already ugly, and abandoned even more so.. :) 

of course, it was pretty too. when on the bridges, seeing all the little uninhabited islands, or when i saw the sign for "private island for sale" (!!), we had a swim in the ocean somewhere along the road, and that was very pretty too. the water was not deep, and so clear.