Odessa

Reflection of a building at the Odessa harborfront. The figure in the center with his arm out is some idiot. The people to his right are his girlfriend (reflected twice in different glass panes) and her dad.


Kseniya and Dad.




In the sculpture garden of the Literary Museum, you can only take a photo of a sculpture if someone is standing next to it. I really wanted to go to this place because I assumed it would be a lot of Sherlock Holmes and Alice in Wonderland and other popular characters, but everything turned out to be from Ukrainian and Russian stories I had never heard of. This is one of the Twelve Chairs. It's probably the best story about chairs.




Anya, Kseniya's little cousin. She's a dancer and a singer, the latter proven by her karaoke rendition of some song about Snickers bars and yogurt.




Anya at the harbor across from the Potemkin Steps.




Anya underneath the giant titular beast at the dolphinarium. "Dolphinarium" seems to be a common term, and it would appear all of Ukraine's aquamuseums contain only one species of sea creature. We saw signs for several dolphinariums, but never any aquariums.

I had to lay on the ground to be able to fit both her and the dolphin's head into the frame, which the security guards (one is in the window near the bottom) did not like. Because pride of place is strongest when that place is next to a field of rotting funhouses (see below).




Why bother building and maintaining a pesky beautiful building for bothersome centuries when some scaffolding and a giant printed tarp will do? They were probably just doing some renovations behind there, but I do like the idea of giving a quick and easy historical makeover to an otherwise bland and boring place like, say, Cleveland.


These cool knobbly trees were growing in groups all over the central part of Odessa.




Right next to a giant luxury waterfront hotel (under construction), this fenced-in area appeared to be some kind of amusement graveyard where carnival attractions go to die. Very strange that such theoretically prime real estate would simply be the resting grounds for a bunch of decaying playhouses. It's like the Secret Garden, but for cripples who are also jerks.












This was hard to capture, but it was a series of sculptures of world landmarks broken apart by trees growing through them. A green takeover of the world, I guess. Oddly enough, some of the monuments, like the Eiffel Tower and that windmill on the left, didn't have any trees near them and appeared to have collapsed or decayed on their own. Mixed messages.


And this is a giant muscular baby breaking out of a metal sphere. Sometimes art makes almost too much sense.