I'm thankful to have had the chance to go to Russia, and thankful to be back.

I've already written about my Crimea trip, so I'll present these HOLGA shots with minimal commentary.






















I've seen so many Lenins all over the former USSR (I wonder if there was some sort of ordinance for how many you needed to have per number of streets or citizens or something?), but this golden one is one of my faves.




I saw this car out and about in town laterб and the guy used it as his mobile dried-fish-selling shack.




Alupka had a huge number of strays, all out sleeping all over the streets. I'd see the same ones around town. I gave them names. This one was Stubby II. There was also Original Stubby and Mini Stubby.

The old lady whose roof this is a photo of owns like 7 cats and sleeps out on the roof during the summer, getting woken up by noisy squirrels and rising with the sun. She took me out on a boat ride on one of my last days in Ukraine.




I asked her if there were sharks in the Black Sea. Her response? "Yes. They are delicious."




The sea is ridiculous.




..and I swim in that bitch sometimes.





So that was it for Crimea. All that was left was to endure the 36-hour train ride back in the hot, stuffy cabin, trying my best to avoid talking to my cabin-mates less they discover my American-ness and decide to rob me.

The Crimean coast has both mountains and sea. The tallest mountain near the town I was in is called Ai Petri. Saint Peter or some such. You can take a cable car to very near to the top, and then follow a path to get to the top-top.






I'm used to mountains being... very mountainous. I'm from Colorado, after all. The first time I drove up I-5 in Oregon and got a look at Mt. Hood, I was pretty baffled and amused. It's just a single mountain, randomly sticking up from nowhere... where are the rest of the mountains? I didn't know they could come in 1's... This place was similarly surprising, because upon ascending the thing, I figured I'd find more mountains. Instead, there were plains, and also a huge setup of restaurants, markets, and other touristy things, choked with the smoke of grilling meat.








I love how the sea blends into the sky.




Here's a photo I had someone take of me.




Transportation was primarily via mini-buses, which were hot, packed with Russian tourists, smelled like sweaty man, and went careening down the windy highways and narrow city streets. Thankfully most of my journeys on them were pretty short.








I like the laundry hanging out in the greenery.

It's a very Russian thing to do to vacation in Crimea (southern Ukrainian peninsula hanging out into the Black Sea), and so for two weeks in July, that's where I was.








My ability to not line up the horizon is really embarrassingly evident when I photography the sea.












The southern coast is dotted with a bunch of little towns that kind of blend into one another along the edges. Work is hard to find, and most people make money by renting their houses to tourists during the summer. During my time there, I did the following things:
- swam in the sea (with little jellyfish!)
- met a lot of new family
- reluctantly ventured out in the heat of the day to go along on excursions to sightseeing places
- got sunburned
- got mosquito-bitten (no AC = windows open & no screens = bugs)
- ate figs off the tree
and it was thoroughly good.




So this shit is called The Swallow's Nest. I misheard and thought it was called Swallow on the Nest for almost the entirety of my trip. The two sound similar in Russian.






I think they were planning to set up a zipline-type thing from this platform down to the castle.