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The history of europe is such an amazing thing to expiernce. As an american it was a surreal expiernce to walk around a city and see things standing that, at times, were thousands of years old.
venice italy was particularly remarkable in this respect. It is hard to do construction there due to the lack of roads so often when old brick structures break they are repaired with bolts rather than replaced. Virtually all the architecture there is quite old as a result. You can feel it.
https://allthatsinteresting.com/pantheon-sinkhole-roman-paving
As someone who lived for 35 years in a historic town of Kraków and now lives in UK I can testify this also has a reverse side: it's really hard to live in a museum :) The truth is old houses are damp, cold and it's difficult to lay modern infrastructure like water & sewage pipes, electric cables etc. Same in the UK, there's a whole cult of Edwardian houses event though they provide luxury comparable with a camping tent...
Precisely, most of the houses in UK have completely ridiculous energy efficiency standards and are essentially heating up the air above.
@kravietz I lived in a house in the netherlands that was sorta old, not crazy old, but maybe 200 years old, and even that house you could feel the wind outside when it blew :)
I was once living in this hotel in Rotterdam and that was really something that stays in memory - read reviews, even the most horrible are 100% true 😂 https://www.tripadvisor.co.uk/Hotel_Review-g188632-d1164032-Reviews-Hotel_Turkuaz-Rotterdam_South_Holland_Province.html#review_335390289
In the UK if you're rich you can tear down the house except for the exterior and practically build a second, modern house inside the shell. Obviously, this only makes sense in case of very large houses.
@kravietz Yea I've heard that before.. would be cool to live in a modernized castle :)
After Kraków and UK I'm kind of allergic to all historic buildings 😂 Next thing I'll be building will be a passive house 😆
@kravietz Go with a row home. I barely need to turn on my heat in the winter because the homes next to me heat me up and i have a high tolerance for cold than they do apparently.
That's also a feature of living in a multi-flat house too but whether it's advantage or disadvantage largely depends on your neighbors. In Poland I was surrounded by heat freaks and with a cracking frost outside I had to open windows to avoid death from overheating 😂
@kravietz Yea I've heard this before, especially with regulations that prevent you from just tearing up a wall or replacing it.