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Category / Nostalgia

Snooping Around Manhattan’s Abandoned Art Deco Bank

Wander around Lower Manhattan you’ll find perhaps the most beautiful doors in the whole city. Curved and ornately designed in silver and bronze, they are adorned with panels depicting methods of transportation from the golden age of travel: luxury steamships, fleets of sleek aircraft, hot air balloons and grand railroads. Most of the passersby that…

Wandering Through the Oldest (and Emptiest) Hospital in Paris

Notre Dame has a very unusual neighbour that no one ever visits. If you’re facing the cathedral’s famous facade, surrounded by a sea of tourists and selfie-sticks, turn to your left and spot the blue door behind the chestnut trees, marked “Entrée“. And enter you must! This blue portal opens up to the Hôtel Dieu, Paris’…

The Forgotten White City Amusement Parks

They called it the city of dreams, a series of white stucco buildings that surrounded a pool of glistening water. As the sun rose above the sky, the buildings would be illuminated in hues of peach, gold, and lavender. The real magic was at night when all the buildings would be lit up with tiny…

Black Debutante Balls: Curtsying with Pride since 1778

Debutante balls, or cotillions, are a centuries old tradition with roots in Europe as far back as the 1700s. The word “debutante” translates to female beginner in French, and refers to a young woman making her debut into polite society. The first of these lavish events was held by King George III in 1780 in…

Hawaii’s Forbidden Island and the Real-Life Swiss Family Robinson who Controls it

Picture what Hawaii might have looked like before it was colonised; a paradise in the tropics, frozen in time and largely untouched by the trappings of the 21st Century. Welcome to controversial island of Ni‘ihau, also known as “The Forbidden Isle”, depending on who you speak to. Only, you’re not really welcome, unless you’re invited…

Discovering Ancient Roman Ruins in a German Parking Lot

One of the most visited sights in Germany is the Cologne Cathedral (der Kölner Dom) where it’s easy to spot swaths of tourists taking in its Gothic beauty. But what a lot of visitors to Cologne don’t realize is that right underneath their feet is a functional parking garage that happens to have an added…

Postcards from a Seaside Village of Upturned Boat Homes

There’s a sleepy seaside village in France with a small fishing port, a population of less than 3,000 and some very peculiar-looking houses. At a moment’s glance, they could almost appear to be an unfortunate pod of beached orcas, but look again carefully at those unusual roofs. Yes, those are boats … upside down! Local fishermen of Équihen-Plage have lived under scavenged boat hulls here…

The Ghost Town left Behind by an American Sect of Hollow Earth Believers

In the once harsh and bug-infested swamplands of southwest Florida, lies the remains of a strange 19th century settlement. Founded by a charismatic leader who led his members into the quagmire to build a “New Jerusalem” and seek immortality through celibacy, the commune revolved around the belief not that the earth was flat, but hollow…

A Beginner’s Guide to Italian Ghost Towns Selling Houses for €1

It’s been a rough few years, but it’s also been a time for re-evaluating our lives and dreaming “out of the box”. Back in 2015, we caught wind of the first Italian towns to adopt the appealing concept of giving away or selling abandoned houses for the symbolic price of 1 euro, in a bid to…

Hitchhiking By Train To Amtrak’s Ghost Town

“Are you sure you want to get off here?,” asks the train conductor, and with good reason: for it is nighttime at Amtrak’s least used railway station. Indeed, Thurmond, West Virginia is so remote and rarely used, that it is a request stop on America’s nation rail network: not only do you have to ask…

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