Reply to Creepiest, bleakest places you've ever been to

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]Chernobyl.

Also, Soviet era apartment blocks and apartments in Ukraine and Russia.[/quote]
I know it will sound weird, but I grew up in one of these blocks and they are nostalgic to me. In fact there is a FB community where people post pictures of Soviet era landscapes, so I am not the only one. 
[/quote]

Wow, that's interesting.  We were posted in the region for work, and in the first year were talked into taking an apartment in a Soviet building that was minutes' walk from work.  It was the entire top floor of a Khrushchyovka, and the apartment itself had been fully renovated and looked great. But outside the windows and in the rest of the building itself, it was bleak as hell.  The crumbling walls and general run-down look, plus the filthy, dog waste-strewn land childrens' "playground" areas outside the blocks were super sad, especially because there were often empty alcohol bottles and cigarettes thrown into the childrens' sand pits or under the swings.  I made friends with a local family who lived in a non-renovated little flat and you could hear EVERYTHING from the neighbours above and around them.

We moved into an expat type building after that one year.[/quote]

Since you didn't grow up there, you won't understand the nostalgia. Many of us grew up in those buildings and associate them with happy childhood memories.

I know it's hard to imagine and of course my parents have their own tales of Soviet-era struggles, and post-Soviet too (there's a reason we left, after all). But overall, where you see bleakness and sadness and dirt, I see a place where I was a carefree happy child. Our apartment wasn't fancy, but it was home. People didn't move around much in the former USSR, so my mom had grown up in the building, and many of the neighbors were like family. That dirty playground was where I spent many fun days playing with friends, while my grandparents, now long gone, sat on a bench nearby to supervise and gossiped with the other pensioners. I've since gone back, and while we sold the apartment decades ago, one of my favorite things to do on those trips is visit our old neighbors who still live in the building and to walk around my old neighborhood.

All in the eye of the beholder. [/quote]

I mean every person who grew up in a grey, overcast area of upstate NY and central PA (as it seems there are many listed on this thread) could say essentially the same thing. Towns that became depressed when manufacturing moved or actually, like my home town, smaller defense contractors in mid sized and smaller cities dried up after the cold war era.  Its certainly in the eye of the beholder. My hometown is bleak, but it holds a lot of great memories for me too[/quote]

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