This Ukranian Life

I recently downloaded the This American Life app for iphone. For $2.99 you get access to every episode plus a bunch of extras including early Ira Glass stories and even some Dave Sedaris readings. I highly recommend. But all of this is by way of telling you about this amazing episode I was listening to the other day called "the house by loon lake." In the episode, the narrator describes his experiences with an abandoned house in a small town in Massachusetts in which, mysteriously, the house's contents seem to have been left just as they were when the house's occupants abandoned it. He finds old letters hinting at illegitimate children, newspapers describing a Nazi invasion, and spectacles sitting neatly on a wallet. For some reason, and maybe it's just because I am so interested in history, I was really taken in by the story. I just love the idea of a life size time capsule, preserving a lost way of life. Maybe that's why I am so fascinated whenever I see pictures of Chernobyl. Being a bit of a Soviet history buff, I can't help but be interested in a preserved soviet era town. Sadly, I've heard that vandals have taken or destroyed a lot of the town. But the pictures always have such a wonderful eerie quality to them.

Am I alone on this one?

Photos Courtesy of Andrzej Karon