Wednesday Photo

Maria Avetisian

This is a view of one of my favorite routes for cross-country skiing along the edge of Losiny Ostrov. I've never run into a real, live moose while skiing there, but I've seen plenty of tracks!

Wednesday Photo

Russian street cats have wonderful body language. These two are doing something more confident than a slink and less aggressive than a prowl. My own cat - a proud stray from Korolev - walks like this when he follows me to the park. Our neighbors here in the U.S. laugh when they see us go by, me out in front and the cat stalking along behind me from parked car to trash can to mail box. I'm not sure whether he follows me because he wants to go to the park or because he likes to know what I'm doing. Either way, he gets noticed a little more than he probably wants.

Wednesday Photo

Maria Avetisyan

I love this photo of a Russian playground, looking through a wrought iron fence and with the winking lights of apartments in the background. 

Wednesday Photo

Andy Kartashov (Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported)

I thought it would be fun to start a tradition of sharing photos of Russia every week. On Wednesdays I'll put up something I enjoy looking at on the off chance that you'll enjoy it too. 

This building is the Narzan Baths in Kislovodsk, a resort town in southern Russia. Kislovodsk also happens to be the place my husband and I spent our honeymoon back in the day! Good memories. We were there in early September and the local market was amazing every morning - amber honeycomb, thick sour cream, sweet figs, spicy ajika. We ate a lot of sandwiches that were random combinations of things we found at the market.