Jim is out getting the car dealt with. In Aktau. By himself. I am at the hotel wondering if I should get in a cab. By myself. In Aktau. Need to deal with the immigration police and register ourselves. A necessity if we are here for more than 5 days even though we have a 60 day visa. It’s a hassle. The Immigracionetz Politizia are not open every day and not open 9-5 so it’s a total crapshoot. At least they are in this city. I am catching up with transferring and sorting photos. Takes a long time. We have 2 cameras and 2 video cameras and 2 iphone cameras and we use whichever one is handy so it’s a lot of devices to keep charged and synced and sorted.
Here are some pictures from the market in Berdyansk, Ukraine. We woke up and went looking for coffee and found this market and had such a great time walking the stalls.
This cute lady in the Berdyansk market had yummy pears. She looks harmless but tried like heck to get us to buy five times more pears than we could have ever eaten.
Loved the blue of this scale against the red. The fish market wasn’t stinky at all and the piles of shimmery silver fish were beautiful. The colors of nature are so beautiful and I wonder if the first humans who melted silver and made jewelry were thinking of fish. There were little cats everywhere trying to get scraps and it was packed with men and women doing their day’s shopping.
We passed by trillions if not zillions of sunflowers and pulled over to take a closer look. Look at this size of this one!This is not a stellar pic but a wonderful reminder of how the market smelled of sunshine and sea air and wonderfully ripe flavorful fruit. It made our mouths water and tummies rumble as we looked for breakfast. Bought a basket and filled it with fruit and ate it all for the next couple of days. Delish!
This stall was like a styled department store compared to the cacophony of the rest of the market. It’s palette of white, ivory, beige and cream with yellow and red touches stood out.
We saw so many fields of sunflowers! Starting int he Czech Republic all the way through Russia. They are the most cheerful sight, so bright and blazingly yellow in the sunlight. We stopped the car so I could get an eye level shot of this field. From our point of view it went all the way as far as we could see. The camera lens picked up some distant buildings on the horizon which we could not see. This was close to the border with Russia in Ukraine. When we got back in the car we saw that our odometer had hit 100,000 miles when we stopped. Totally cool and serendipitous, as if we were meant to stop there.
