Whenever someone talks about a leaning tower, the image of the leaning tower of Pisa in Italy comes to mind. The famous tower where Galileo Galilei dropped weights to demonstrate the principle of mass.
Majestic
In Leeuwarden, Holland stands another leaning tower called the Oldehove. This one, apart from leaning towards one side is also crooked as a banana. It also leans more than the tower of Pisa. Galileo would have been able to do even more experiments here.
This is a “slogan” that is written on many schools in Ukraine and probably in Russia as well. This is one of the mottos from an illustrious father of the Soviet Union: V. I. Lenin.
Famous saying by a famous man
Now I am not a fan of everything he had to say and everything he put in motion to create the Soviet Union, but this little gem dates from far before the Russian Revolution, probably around 1909 and for me it holds the truth. Learning is an important part of life and should never be considered finished.
We are in Konotop, a small city in the north of Ukraine. The city was first mentioned in 1635 in various documents as Novoselitsa, something like New Little Village. Nice name for an emerging city.
One of the older houses
Many battles have been fought in this region, from ancient times (yes, 1635 is pretty ancient) until the last World War, or as they call it here: the Great Patriotic War.
Ok, by now we know we cannot travel to the future, at least not without risking our lives. Perhaps that is what travelling to the future is all about… Travelling to the past is a different question. Going to a museum is one possibility, but where can you go to experience real life in the past?
Konotop by night
Without saying that life is “en retard”, we can say that life’s conditions are different in different countries. Like I said last time, Ukraine is in many viewpoints behind on our well established life. In other points it could make a nice example for North America.
Everybody has at least once in his or her life dreamed of travelling in time. Be it to the future or to the past. We know today (perhaps not tomorrow) that this is fairly impossible. Unless …
Farmhouse
… you go to a museum where the modus operandi is to immerse the visitors in the past. One can do this by dressing the guides in clothes of the epoch and making them talk about daily issues of that time.
Visitors then get a better idea of life of that period. There are many such places in the world, but let’s start this journey close to home: Lower Fort Garry, Manitoba, Canada.