Europe = Old

Even after spending several months in France in college, it still blows me away how old everything here is. And not just that: it's amazing to me just how casual they are about it. In the U.S., Old Things are celebrated; they're stockpiled in museums, they're made into tourist attractions, people drive from miles around to see them. They do the same thing, here, too, of course, for some buildings, some relics: the biggest church in town for example, or the oldest sculpture. But, you can walk a few blocks, and stumble across another, smaller structure, also a thousand years old, next to a sushi restaurant, without even a commemorative  plaque to indicate the name of the building, or what it was used for.

We passed by a church on our orientation tour of the city: it looked absolutely ancient, dating to sometime soon after the first caveman crawled out of the ground to build the first basilica. I asked the tour guide what the name of it was.

"I dunno." "There are a lot of churches in Rouen."

And that was that.

I went to an ironworks museum. This swiss army knife? Pre-Columbus.

There were keys, corkscrews, hairties, scissors, hand-irons, predating the birth of our nation. 

Also, not particularly old (19th century), but still cool: this alarm-rigged safe. (See if you can spot the alarm):