kiev

"Do you like it so much?" asked my sister. "No," said I "I DISlike so much" I simply couldn't stop taking pictures of this Kiev hotel.
It's called Salut, such a nice name for such a tacky place. Dunno, maybe Kievians like it, who knows. It certainly stands out - it's not massive and gray like most other edifices in Kiev but it's still a bloody blot.
Golden domes of countless Orthodox churches interweave with what remains of the previous system creating a unique patchwork of old and older. Both styles pompous, they make you feel out of place, the era of such buildings like this one is hopefully over and the churches simply don't fit into this urban mess, either way - not only do they fit one another, they also leave no room for what could and should be happening in a modern city architecturewise. Simplicity must be a taboo concept there.
If the buildings leave no place for the new, the streets definitely do. I have never in my life seen so many hight-end posh cars all in one place, not even in the U.S. My Toyota looked pretty lousy, to say the least, among all those big, bugger-off-I-have-black-windows SUVs and other not so compact cars.
Who drove them is yet another story.

long weekend empty weekend

i've never seen warsaw this deserted, cafes closed, stores (and shelves) empty, traffic like in a provincial town on a sunday morning. it looked almost ridiculous - the empty warsaw

coming up:
kiev
warsaw
nieborów
tübingen
stuttgart
...

to catch up on:
łuków
łódź
grand canyon
boyup brook
udaipur
...

roztocze

no pictures this time, just good memories brought back from a weekend get-away in Roztocze. real nice landscapes, perfect for bike-riding, not so perfect for a penniless student vel. would-be movie festival goer.
I went to a cute little town of Zwierzyniec while we slept in Szczebrzeszyn, full of references to a beetle, a monument of a beetle playing violin, a Beetle bookstore and all this. It's a small town, two churches, one main street, one closed Orthodox church, one totally dilapidated Jewish cemetery. Worth a visit on a slow sunny day, as one of many stops on the way thru a beautiful region. Enjoy.

Wiejska, right opposite my workplace, I quite like it, not the best shot, must admit. But it's a kind of thing you walk pass every day and you don't notice it, after all, it's just a roof over a garage entry. There must be a whole lot of sights like that in Warsaw. I dont' have too much time for a quest for them, though, but I'll do my best. If not Warsaw, there's always Kiev coming up pretty soon.