Old Salem

The week before Christmas we went for a walk around Old Salem. Old Salem is a neighborhood in Winston-Salem, NC, that has been kept more or less similar to what it was when the city was founded, in the 18th century, by Moravians moving from Pennsylvania.

There are regular people now living in the old houses, and the area features a college campus as well. The locals live like everybody else (it was pretty hard to keep cars out of the pictures) but they clearly take pride in the heritage of their neighborhood, they keep the area looking "original" and they set up lots of overpriced but nice gift shops for the tourists. There are a few museums as well, but you need a ticket for those. When we have more time we'll go back and take a look at those too.

There are still several Moravian Churches in the area to this day, and few know that the nationally reknown bank Wachovia took its name from this region (the Moravians thought that the area looked similar to their native Wach, and named it Wachovia).
We were hoping to see a lot of nice Christmas decorations (they had even been advertising on the radio), but we found it to be rather subdued. Still pretty nice though.