I like hotel rooms, if only because they are so clean and empty of the clutter of my life and all my living spaces.

Some photos shot from moving trains.

What do you do with the biggest country in the world? Make a model of the whole damn thing, clearly.




A movie studio somewhere in Eastern Russia.




Okay, so the model's a representation. But it is still very big, housed in a warehouse in the southern part of St. Petersburg.




The model had working lights, day and night, thunderstorms, driving cars and subway trains. Pretty neat shit.
















This man was standing in a man-sized hole in the model in order to work on this piece of it. I wish I could have conveyed that better, but I had a shortage of lenses to work with.






I love the mini-worlds created in these kinds of models. I think I was only a few life turns away from being obsessed and spending my life building models of things in my garage.

Both my trips to Novgorod were made up of lots of shitty excursions that involved standing around monasteries and other religious buildings and listening to entirely too long histories about religion and Russia's farming past and other topics, delivered in boring-fact-packed, mechanic manners by Soviet-era guides.

Adding to my love of visits to the city, the second time around it fucking poured. It was February in Russia, and my down coat and I were under the impression that temperatures much above 0 C were unheard of. Therefore, I was unprepared for rain. Freezing temperatures are one thing, but (as Oregon taught me well) the outfitting needed to be waterproof is a whole new level of expensive. So I got to stand in the rain and soak up freezing rainwater with my down while I prayed for the guides to wrap it the fuck up already.






The first time around.

This trip to Helsinki was the first time in as long as I can remember that cold and I have been so intimate. It was the kind of cold that permeates to your core and settles in, continuing to chill from the inside even after you've moved to a warmer place. I think I got an idea of the dangers of cold, and the huge difference that just continuing to move makes. It's something that kind of taps awake your lizard brain, brings you back to the necessities and what really matters (which is not fucking freezing to death).
























The progression from uncomfortably cold to unbearably cold drove me into this little bohemian-looking cafe across from the Christmas-colored church, one of the few open cafes in the area. The owner had dreadlocks and spoke wonderful English (though I don't actually think he spoke much Finnish, so must've been from somewhere else).