I was very happy to see that mipiano has released a new November theme in Hive Collector. However, when I saw that the theme was a record collection, I knew I was going to skip November (ie, skip the theme for November 😁) I love gramophone records, they were present when I was growing up, although even at that time, more than 30 years ago, they were losing popularity, then they were replaced by magnetic tapes, then CDs...
And that's how we got to today with Spotify and similar platforms where people listen to music. When one mentions the medium on which one's favorite tracks are stored, today it is playlists, and often various portable discs with hundreds and thousands of tracks.
I had the opportunity to enjoy the sound reproduced from phonograph records on my brother's Technics turntable. He had an impressive collection of records, but the question is where are they today, after 30 years.
The quiet sound that the needle makes as it moves across the board has always been like music for some miniature creatures (because it seemed to me that only those miniature creatures could hear such quiet sounds), and the crackling in the speakers after turning on the amplifier was a prelude to perfection for my ears.
But enough about records, because even though they are the topic of November, they are not the topic of my post.
When I saw the mention of vinyl and plastic, I thought of metal and the boxes I bought as souvenirs while visiting some of the cities in Europe.
Only one of these boxes is a gift, this biggest one, a mock-up of a telephone box, which arrived to me from Great Britain.
I bought all the others myself. Boxes from the Czech Republic, Spain, Greece, Holland... There were cakes in one of them, I think it was the one from the Netherlands. These are biscuits with caramel in the middle that go well with tea (Stroopwafel).
Most of the boxes were filled with chocolate pralines or bonbons, but those sweets were not that important, we ate some of them as soon as we bought the box (or left those chocolates in the hotel room) because the idea was to take the box home as a souvenir, and the sweets would only burden our luggage.
And so, these two boxes arrived with us from the Czech Republic.
We use one in the kitchen, for storing spices, and the other is in the living room, where we keep spare keys, receipts for purchased technical devices, as well as some small things that we need on a daily basis.
We bought these smaller boxes in Spain, in Madrid and Barcelona, as can be concluded from the details on the boxes.
They are intended for storing ornaments and jewelry, various bracelets, rings, earrings and similar trinkets.
Each one of them comes to us as a great souvenir, and in addition to being useful for storing small things that we would otherwise lose in the apartment, the boxes mean something to us because the details in the pictures can easily take our minds back to the streets with narrow houses in Amsterdam, to the Major or Sol squares in Madrid, in front of the Batlo or Milla houses, and the Sagrada Familia in Barcelona, in front of the Visehrad, the astronomical clock or the singing house in Prague and just one look at the box from Greece reminds me of a warm summer in these cold days.
Just as the sound of a gramophone record would take me back to past times and fill me with memories, these boxes also take me back to the time of traveling and visiting the mentioned cities and attractions in them.
Although sometimes we have excess and they make a crowd on the shelves (and require additional dusting), I am glad that we have them in our collection, which I am now presenting to you.
Until some new month and theme to take part in, I salute you, Hive collectors!