DianneW

Start off with our first purchased House... in Beddington, Surrey. 82 Guy Road next to the River Wandle and off of Beddington Lane a truly pleasant place to live at one time, seems strange now they have put up railings to stop you going in it, accident wise or pleasure wise..both for new safety laws...
Here is the River way way back even before I was thought of...
Very Surprised the wiki web page on Beddington has no mention of the River Wandle..without it, how would transportation of goods have taken place, of course the Mills would never had been built there without water flowing...
https://hosting.photobucket.com/imag...=175&crop=fill

also there is a huge amount of photos articles etc on the Wandle River to see, but the painting site I chose as lots of people like also looking at artworks....

https://friendsofhoneywood.co.uk/painted-wandle.html

The Mill I worked in is now called Wandle Mills but originally named Beddington Mills.
The Mill House, building next right from the Mills was originally called the Mill House.

The link is there for any interest in the History of the Place...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beddington

Married in that Beddington Church in 1967..
My late Dad and moi..
..

Guybrush

Nice! I love the english country side. So beautiful

I've been all over the south coast from Lands end to Dover, but not so much the rest of the country.. just a canal boat trip somewhere close to London with my family in the mid-90s.

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Frownland

I lived in a small town near Yosemite called Mariposa for about seven years as a kid. Definitely the most beautiful place I ever lived, with rolling foothills, oaks galore, creeks, rivers, massive granite faces, and all of that good stuff. In the mornings, you can find a vista to see the tule fog hanging over the central valley like an ocean. I'm not sure where this photo was taken, but it looks a lot like this:



We were squatting in a trailer on somebody's large property (I didn't know that as a kid), keeping warm with a wood burning stove and fallen trees nearby. We never had to cut any down. There was a massive granite boulder/hill that was a couple of miles wide that I loved to climb on in addition to the smaller boulders lying all around. I feel like you have to be crazy to not love nature, but living there definitely cemented that appreciation for me. I also think it pushed me toward academia because with everything so spread out, playdates were hard to pull off, so school was pretty much the only time you had to kick it with the boys and I'd look forward to going.

Mariposa today is mainly a stopping off point for people on their way to Yosemite. When I was living there, an arsonist set off a series of fires that destroyed a good deal of the county. There are always fires in California, but it was the worst they'd experienced since the sixties. The 2018 fire season (year of the Camp Fire) topped it as the most destructive in county history. We were at school when they evacuated it and you could see the flames on the top of a hill almost a mile away from the campus. We also lived there during the Ferguson landslide that blocked the highway between the town and Yosemite for months. It was a huge deal for the townspeople, I remember sharing my lunch with my friend for a few weeks because his family was having trouble getting enough food and all assistance resources were running dry. They moved before it was cleared up.

Driving into the town, you can see a neon green patch of land on one of the taller hills that stands out from the forest surrounding it. In the 60s, the government claimed the plot of land from the county, saying they would use it to test New and Improved Fertilizers for the Brave New World or some ****. Locals think they were testing weapons of agricultural terrorism.

The town has a massive KKK presence. I think there were two black families in the town and one of the girls was in my grade at school. She was blind in one eye because a man at her church threw bleach in her face as a toddler. This was the era of colour blindness as a way to ignore racism, so I didn't make the race connection when I learned about it, I just thought that it was a crazy thing that happened to her. My middle school principal wore blackface on Halloween, which most of the school found hilarious. There was a thriving nazi punk scene, so growing up I thought that people just got swastika tattoos to be provocative like they would a mohawk. I left partway through my freshman year of high school and wonder all the time how differently things would've panned out if I stayed there. There were some BLM demonstrators in the town last year, so maybe the internet is aiding a shift in the youth there. I hope so.

Mariposa was originally a mining town, and the earliest settlers pillaged and raped the local Native American villages until the majority of the tribes agreed to a treaty to end the slaughter. The Ahwahneechees and Chowchillas refused to submit and the settlers waged the Mariposa War on them. The miners indiscriminately killed Native Americans in the area, so many of those in the tribes who signed peace treaties were murdered in the attacks. The miner militias got assistance from the governor, and eventually the Ahwahneechees and Chowchillas were exiled to the barren desert tract that is the Chowchilla reserve (they were the first to assimilate to subjugation, so they received the honourific title). The touristy spots mostly focus on the gold part and an unverified association with John Muir. If you go panning in a creek, you can still find some gold! How fun!

I've also lived in Phoenix area Arizona, Southern California, and the California central valley. Los Angeles' air is gross in the summer but it's been my favourite place to live so far because there's so much cool **** and people to do. There's plenty of history y'all can look into on that because I went on for longer than I expected about Mariposa. Chinatown and Inside the Mind of Watts are good 20th century perspectives.

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Studies show that when a given norm is changed in the face of the unchanging, the remaining contradictions will parallel the truth.

Guybrush

^That's quite dark, Frown :O Interesting, though.

When I joined up on MB, I'm pretty sure I was living in Longyearbyen, a town of about 2500-3000ish people in the high arctic on the island Spitsbergen which is part of the Svalbard archipelago.. phew.

Since it's in the high arctic, you have polar bears, glaciers, no trees and either you have the sun up 24/7 during the summer months or its just dark through the winter months. The transition periods, spring and autumn, feel very short.

When I joined MB, it was winter and I was living alone in this big barrack. Every day, I went to uni to work in the biology lab, usually without meeting anyone because both students and staff had moved back to the mainland for the coming yule tide. I lived like that for about two weeks. I would listen to music and occasionally get drunk by myself on fine whiskey. I needed some human interaction, so joined up here.

Svalbard was a haven for whaling back in the day and there were boats and settlements from various countries. As whaling died down, people moved out, but then coal mining became a thing. Coal mining supported three bigger settlements, Longyearbyen, Pyramiden and Barentsburg with the latter two being under russian control (although Norway rule over Svalbard according to the Svalbard treaty). Many if not most of the coal miners working in Pyramiden died in a plane crash in the 90s and since then, it's been a ghost town, so now there's basically Longyearbyen and Barentsburg left.

Today, the "Big Norwegian" coal company is shutting down their operations on Svalbard which makes the future of Longyearbyen more than a little uncertain. There's a tourism trade up there which is what I believe most people there hope will help save Longyearbyen from becoming another ghost town like Pyramiden.

Some parts of the year, Longyearbyen might look like this:

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Marie Monday

that's fascinating. I've always had an obsession with small polar settlements and what it's like to live there so I'd love to hear more about it.
the mariposa story is beautiful too.

As for me, I was born in Amsterdam, lived there as a small child and uni student. The first house was one floor in a beautiful house around the corner of the old Heineken factory, idk how my mom found that for cheap.
For most of my childhood I grew up in a village close to Amsterdam, within cycling distance, so a suburb by international standards. It's typical pretty Dutch village in a polder landscape, there are at least 5 windmills in a 5km radius. This looks similar to my village:

It's a boring place to grow up though. In the Dutch golden age the area became a place for rich people to build country homes near the city and settle, and that's still what it is today really. I don't know much else about its history.

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Guybrush

Nice, Marie It looks beautiful and I like the little gardens bordering the canal.

I had a girlfriend in The Hague some 15-20 years ago and I would visit her regularly, several times a year, so.. I've spent some time in Netherlands, also Amsterdam. Something which is a little weird is that since it's a flat country, you don't see much landscape beyond the street you're standing in. Coming from a hilly country, it's a thing I immediately noticed.

That aside, I really like Netherlands, especially Amsterdam and the snack foods, particularly french fries with satay sauce and mayonnaise. There's also a sandwich spread I miss which has been hard to identify, but we bought it at supermarkets. It seemed like ground meat mixed with spices so it was kinda orange in colour? And we got it in clear plastic containers. There's nothing quite like it here, so it stands out in my memory

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Marie Monday

cool! the spread you mean is filet Americain I think. It's pretty good, I had no idea it's not much of an international thing

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Guybrush

Thanks, that's it! Last time I had it was in 2005 and I still think about it

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jwb

(0 - 9 months old) Bergen county NJ ->
(9 months - 8 yrs old) West Palm, FL ->
(8 - 9 yrs old) Colchester, VT ->
(9 - 11 yrs old) West Palm, FL ->
(11 - 12 yrs old) Statesville, NC ->
(12 - 13 yrs old) Lake worth, FL ->
(13 - 14 yrs old) Statesville, NC ->
(14 - 19 yrs old) Lake worth, FL ->
(19 - 20 yrs old) Pawtucket, RI ->
(20 - 24 yrs old) Lake worth, FL->
(~7 yrs) Statesville, NC ->
(~2 yrs) Greensboro, NC ->
(Currently 34 yrs old) Statesville, NC

jwb

reminds me of east of Eden