SAMARKAND, UZBEKISTAN, 1998

This is a shot from my first trip to Samarkand in 1998, in the fall. I woke up early in the morning to get these shots before tourist groups were taken through. There have been a lot of changes since then - now there is more fresh paint and souvenier stands. Most of these ancient sites had a much more authentic appeal to them before they became commercialized and distorted to appear ina way they never did originally purely for the sake of tourists' eyes.

A ROOM WITH A VIEW, KIMEP, AUGUST, 1998

This was the first room I stayed in in the Kazakhstan Institute for Management and Economic Planning (KIMEP). I was told that this was one of the former party schools and this was dormitory for it. The room was better than my dormitory room in Queen's University, Canada, and had hardwood floors, one bathroom for every two rooms here together, a balcony, from which I took the shot below, and a desk, two beds, built in closet space and a hangining wall radio. If there were a dormitory room that ought not to be made Western, this is it. Otherwise it would be made more expensive, the room would have awful carpets, a whole bunch of advertisement packages for new students, and people would tell you it was the highest quality in the world.

FIRST IMPRESSION

I arrived for my first time in the Former USSR in August, 1998, into Alma-Ata. I left Frankfurt on a nightflight and all I was able to see was that the land on the East of the border with the "West" did not look all that noticeably different. Then I arrived in this city in Kazakhstan at nighttime, went to the compound where I would stay for some days, and woke in the morning to see this view from my balcony window.

EN ROUTE TO ALBUQUERQUE, NEW MEXICO

I left Odessa, Ukraine, on June, 16, 2005 to leave for the USA where I will go back to school at the University of New Mexico. I am now in Halifax, Nova Scotia, re-packing yet again. I do not have any recent pictures to post from Halifax at the moment in spite of a jazz festival taking place - which I have not had time to visit, but I do have this shot taken back in July, 1999, just before I moved to Ukraine while the tall ships were visiting the Port. Behind me is the МИР tall ship. Mir can mean earth, but it can also mean peace - eitherway it is a great Russian word with lots of color and meaning yet simple and spelled the way it actually sounds.

Khiva, Uzbekistan, 1999

I was quite surprised that Central Asia up to and including this day had not been corrupted by Western Capitalism. These archeological dig sites were virtually unprotected and I decided to have my picture taken event hough I haven't the faintest idea of which period the relic in my hand dates from or who likely left it behind during some dramatic episode. MOST IMPORTANTLY, I have no idea what it would fetch in the market and suspect once people figure it out, there will bebarbed wire all over the place. After all, we only protect valuable objects, not ones with historical significance necessarily.

Me in Khiva, 1999

My eyes might be closed just by coicidence, or maybe it was something else. I think this is the day my firend and I found Guiness in a small tea hut in the town centre. So it might have been that.

Khiva, Uzbekistan, Before Tourism, 1999

Crimea, Ukraine, May, 2005

Its not my camera, these are the colors as I remember them in the South of Ukraine. My memory fails me along coastlines like this, but I think it is along this coastline in the background where Gorbachev had his dacha - the famous one where he was held under house arrest during an attempted coup in 1991. Sure, house arrest, I believe that. Now that I see how beautiful the place is and how no one outside the region would have ever suspected! "Yeah, I am stuck down here on the awful Black Sea coast amidst turbulent storms and dark waters...blah blah blah" All politicians apparently are the same. Heck, I would hold myself under house arrest here too. To be fair to empirical evidence, someone had pointed the dacha out as we passed by and it was nothing as luxurious as you might expect.

Donetsk, Ukraine, Dyetskiy Dom, February, 2005

Donetsk, Ukraine, Dyetskiy Dom, February, 2005

Donetsk, Ukraine, Dyetskiy Dom, February, 2005

Me in Kyrghyzstan, 1999, Springtime

This is me outside the ciy centre of Bishkek - obviously I am not in the ciy centre. I am not sure why I wrote that. This was the beginning of a beautiful day spent in the mountains with a colleague of mine fromt he economics department, Lyudmila Konstans, and two of her friends, who insisted on fishing, but not fishing (apparently it is illegal to fish in this particular park). I am not sure that the fish were aware that they were breaking the rules. In the end they were roasted for it.

Osh Bazaar, Bishkek, Kyrghyzstan, 2002

If you go to a decent grocer in Canada, you will find dried apricots, but not the selection that you would in Central Asia. This row of bins is just for dried apricots. A kg costs about 50 cents.