Just a block away from the house where our family lived since I was five there was a large park which was called “the Park of the Mine City.” The park was surrounded by a stone wall, partly decomposed. The story goes that Mine City was a mine factory in the beginning of the century. Not much is left now, other than a couple heavy-set storage buildings and a few entrances into the underground. When I was a kid we would go into one of those entrances after school and take a path to the nearest other entrance. On the way we passed a side tonnel that we never dared to enter. Kids said it went all the way to Port Arthur in China. There is also a sequence of three lakes, which was supposedly used for testing mines and torpedos.

A few years after we moved to the neighborhood the center Mine City was converted to a “Park of Culture and Recreation” constructed through “popular construction method” which means that people got “volunteered” to go work on park improvement. Among other things, a small movie theater was built which was dedicated to just kids movies. As we discovered, the park has fallen apart, since then. The movie theater, in particular, is now in ruins.