Showing posts with label coal. Show all posts
Showing posts with label coal. Show all posts

18 May 2010

Our Apartment

Ok! some of you wanted to see our apartment. Here are pictures of the living room/kitchen, which is one room. We also have a bedroom and a bathroom, but they were dirty so I didn't take a photo.

The living room section.

You may be thrown by the stick on the wall. Yeah its a stick on the wall. We spray painted it gold and hung it up there. You may also notice the weird fireplace-ish looking thing under the light. That is the heater. Its a glorified space heater and its the only heat we have in our apartment, not because it doesn't get cold, thats just how the heating works. A lot of people still use wood stoves as the only source of heating (I really romanticize with this, and wish we had a wood stove). It gets crazier. In the supermarket you can also buy a 20kg bag of coal, yes COAL, for heating. Yes and they are still pioneering this advanced technology as there are ads in the papers and stuff about "new coal technology." To be fair, it's not really that weird as there are coal mines on the South Island, it is cheap and still widely used everywhere to create electricity. Even in my beloved hippie/greenie Madison I still managed to live 5 blocks from a coal power plant. But using it to heat a home, just seems archaic for some reason.

I digress. TO THE KITCHEN!

No sticks or weird stuff in here. Just a tiny fridge.

10 November 2009

West Virginia (I'm coming home)

Got out of DC and drove to the edge of the Blue Ridge Parkway and spent the night. Early the next morning we started out by driving 50 miles or so of the parkway.

Then we drove into West Virginia on our way to visit Joel, who lives in the Southwestern corner of the state, a major coal mining area. Here is a coal mine:

Out back of Joel's house in Logan.

We went to take a hike with Joel in the state park near Logan and ran into a Pioneer days fest and learned about a Native American vision quests and how to make a good knife blade. After pioneer fest and hiking we purchased some Big Wheels ice cream treats and did a short driving tour of the city. Yum!

We didn't stop here, but we did notice this at a stoplight on the boarder of WV and Kentucky. We were in real Appalachia.