A Tribute to Slavic Transportation and Some Other Stuff

Transportation here is an incredible experience, something entirely unique. And yes, I love every second of it. Here are some shots of the various forms of transportation. Unfortunately unable to get a photo of the interior of a bus (маршрутка), which had a leopard interior with pink curtains and was blasting Ukrainian music. However, here's a few shots of what transportations is like here :)

Nothing too strange here.

This is the train station. Trains are also fun, though sleeping on them is unfun...

This is the exterior of the bus with the leopard print seats and the pink curtains :) 

The trams, safely stored away for the day :) 

A working tram, jammed full of people that just about smoked that rickety red Lada on the left 

This is my dream car. Yes, a purple Lada :) What more could I want :) 

The inside of one of the nicer Ladas. Here you pay when you disembark the tram. People will often pass up their money, hand-to-hand to the driver and lay it on the red carpet at the front there :) 

A lada wagon :) 

Train yards. Super cool. I could have wandered around here all day :)

The Marshrootka (Маршрутка). There is no Metro system is Odessa, so this is the usual form of getting around. These yellow buses are privately owned and don't run on any kind of schedule. They just come when they come :) 

A green Lada. I really just can't get enough of the Ladas. There is also a Ukrainian brand, which looks like a Lada, but is evidently even worse... :)

As you may already know, I'm a big fan of graffiti, well, only when it's interesting. Odessa has a wealth of graffiti. Here is a taste of some of what is available here  :)

And here is a very famous sign post, revealing the directions of all kinds of cities all over the world. I could hardly believe it when I saw that Vancouver was mentioned! :) For the most part, people here don't seem to know that Canada exists, or if they do, they treat is as part of America... I know, I don't want to talk about it... :)

My artsy shot of the cobbles in Old Odessa

There is a plethora of styles here. I dig it. I think this fellow's hair nicely completes his outfit :) 

Here's a taste of women's fashion here :) I don't think I can pull this style off... :) Better not to try, I think :)

Here are some pretty trendy lassies doing a bit of a photo shoot. I was told it was because everyone here has Kontact, the Slavic version of Facebook, and you need to have a really stylish picture for this :)

Here are the Potemkin Steps. I didn't think they were all that cool until I spoke to Tony afterwards and he told me that they were cool because they are an optical illusion. I'll leave you to look it up on Wikipedia for a full explanation :)

Some birds flying around at the Port. I was having fun with the very savvy camera that World Hope has let me use for the trip :) 

A wedding tradition both here and in Russia, is to put a lock on some famous something in your region. Here, they put the locks on this bridge, which they call the Love Bridge :) The government comes around about once a year to cut them off because there are so many. Kind of a neat tradition, I think.

And here's just a roof top shot in the old tow. I really liked it. 

And so, I am very much loving it here very much! :) Living with the girls is fantastic. They are very kind to me and we have a good sum of fun :) Everything is interesting to me and I have way too many photos to put on the blog! :) If you want to check out the work stuff, please click here to the project blog. The next few days will be busy as we will be trekking off to a few orphanages in the area and will be interviewing the kids, the workers, and, hopefully, the directors. I'll keep you posted! :)