131 - Life in the Past

131 - Life in the Past
Originally uploaded by gingerpig2000

We had a day out visiting a small national park to the southeast of Lublin, only to discover that their was almost nothing in the way of facilities for visitors, not even places to park along the roads in the woods. It was very pleasant, and using the rule of big trees = former big house or a church, we found a former dwor that has spent the years since the war as a school to sit and have lunch in the grounds.

Every village seems to have its own former manor house, and fire station, with the latter often having been built as part of the manor estate sometime prior to the second world war. Some are no longer used, but most are manned by volunteers although the costs must be relatively high and I am not sure of the level of expertise or equipment.

In Rybczewice, which had quite and extensive former estate complex including many fine limestone with red-brick-trimming buildings, also featured a renovated pavilion-style shopping building from the 1960s/70s. The latter are very common in the larger villages here, most looking sad and decayed although still generally in use, and have a single entrance and an interior divided into different shops traditionally selling food, clothes, household goods and furniture.

The image here is the telephone booth on the side of the entrance to the shopping building, and which should have been raised after a ramp for the handicapped was added a couple of years ago. TPSA, or Orange as it is now known, was the state telephone company and still retains a lot of the former thinking from the socialist era. I can quite imagine that with the increased use of mobile phones (for which there is a mast behind the building), the amount of use this phone must get is probably falling - so why bother going to the expense of resiting it? I might point out that the booth type is long out of date, and will one day soon be quite a rarity.