And here we are — the last three sets of images.  Despite commentary and captions, there is always much more to a trip than gets written.  If you have questions or want any details, just let me know and I’ll fill in some of the blanks.

Here are the final beach pictures of our visit. Unfortunately, this was a hot hot hot day, and unlike the the other beaches where you basically got out of your transportation and were there, this required lots of extra travel. I don’t think it was worth the effort, and I would definitely tell people not to bother going here.  The Marina itself seemed OK, but if you going for the beach, don’t.
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Our last night in Dubai was also water based. No beach, though; just the sights and sounds of the second most influential body of water in the development of Dubai.  It’s called a “creek,” but as you’ll see from the pictures, there’s a bit of heft to it.  (I would have liked to have taken on the creek dinner cruises, but that didn’t happen. Oh well.)
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And lastly, some parting shots. I’ve never photographed me leaving somewhere, but that was the theme of these last images.  I’m reminded of that Simpsons episode, where Patty and Selma are showing an exhaustively complete set of slides of their vacation. Maybe this isn’t quite as bad, but it still seemed odd to get photos of the road to the airport.
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Sorry to have so many picture posts, but given how the gallery plugin works, I had to break things up a bit.  Don’t worry, we’re almost done.  (I did mention there were 600 pictures, right?)

This was my wife’s solo excursion to Abu Dhabi. I’ve tried to faithfully relate what she told me about it, but I know she wasn’t overly impressed. But she did get some good pictures, and from them I kind of wish I’d been along for part of it.  If that had been possible — and it was all narrated in Russian — I’m sure I would have gone.  (Even so, it was nice to have a free day and get caught up on all my blogging.)
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No worries — there are more beach pictures. I’m still not a sun-guy and I still think beaches have way too much sand, but of the ones we visited, the beach at Al Mamzar was probably the best.  It was out of the way, so probably had more local than tourists.
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Our big excursion as a couple was the safari.  From the brochure descriptions, these safaris sound totally cheesy and touristy — and they are — but it was also a lot of fun.  We didn’t do everything that the excursion offered — camel rides for instance — but even so, we both had a very enjoyable time.  If I were to go back to Dubai, I’d probably do this again.
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Like the photos of the hotel, these photos of my wife around the pool are from different days during the week.  The pool was on the roof of the hotel, and I think we were up there a total of three times.  (Three beaches, three pool trips — just about every day we were in some water.)
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My wife showed amazing restraint since she waited until our second day in Dubai to go to the beach. At least I think it was the second day. I’m having trouble keeping it all straight — probably the latent effects of heat exhaustion. In any case, it was definitely our first trip to the water, no matter which day it actually happened.
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After a day at the beach, we spent the evening riding the rails.  Well, one rail — the Palm Monorail. Unfortunately, things get dark in Dubai early — the sun is going down at 6 and it’s usually dark by 8 — and we had a somewhat late start going there.  (In theory we were going there to see a large public aquarium, but my research didn’t show any such thing; our visit proved my research better than my wife’s information, but I didn’t gloat.  The night was also our first taxi ride through Dubai, and a ride on their monorail, so it wasn’t a complete waste of time.  Even so, it would have been better to have left an hour earlier.
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The next day was the shopping day, the day we wandered the souks, ran into several “helpful” people wanting to sell us stuff, and when my wife bought a fur coat.  (Sorry, no images of the coat, she still needs to send me some.)  Read some more about the day here.
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My wife and I both had cameras, at least for part of the trip.  Hers died a couple days in, and we were sharing mine for about half the week.  Between the two of us, we took 665 photos, plus one video — about 2 gigabytes of imagery.  So it’s been a real challenge to sort them all, put them in some order, resize them, then upload and label them — all while trying to rebuild the computer I use for this sort of thing.  (I just don’t have all the same and/or right tools on my Mac or netbook.)  Waay too much fun.

But I think I’ve got things all set, so here we go.  I’ve got things grouped into the major parts of the trip, and put them more or less chronologically.  Where appropriate, I’ve provided links back to the posts of the day/event, but there are more specific comments on the images themselves.

(FYI, use the Esc key to get out of the larger image view.  Sorry it’s not more obvious, but I didn’t write this image plugin.)

Since we gotta start somewhere, here are a couple shots from the airport on our way out of the country. (There’s also one of our return; I didn’t want to leave it orphaned.) my wife’s desire to photo-document every aspect of our trip had not yet kicked into full gear, or else you would be looking at dozens of pictures of Zhulyany airport.
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The hotel photos are next, since that’s where we ended up after getting off the plane. I’ve put all the hotel pictures together, even though they were taken at various times during the week. There were/are definitely ritzier hotels in Dubai, but as I posted, this place is pretty smart in having a deal with a Russian tour company. Based on the fluctuating room prices on the outdoor sign and the number of people in the lobby at any time, I think they were almost always full.
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 Our first real outing in Dubai was to Dubai Mall and Dubai Fountain.  Fortunately, one overlooks the other — you can guess the order — and we had some good seats to watch the waterworks while we ate dinner.  You can read more here, but be sure to flip through the photos and check out the captions for additional information and comments.
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I had hoped to have trip pictures up this past weekend, but obviously that didn’t happen.  It seems that while I was away, everything decided to break.  Maybe there was a massive EMP that struck Portland.  It could have happened; I wasn’t getting regular news while I was away.

My main computer is having disk problems, making it next to impossible to do anything.  It doesn’t appear (yet) that I’ve had a lot of data loss, but I’ve spent a good deal of the weekend working to recover what I could.  This came at the expense of sorting through the 650+ photos that my wife and I acquired on the trip.

So, I’m working as quickly as I can to get things up,  but it might be just a bit longer.  Still, if I can get my photos posted in less than a month’s time, I’ll still be ahead of prior trips.  Continue to watch this space; the pictures is a-comin’.

(Apart from my computer issue, there is something happening to the display on my microwave, and the batteries on my little tabletop weather station have died.  All while I was away.  Very, very weird.)

Here were are, gang — the final set of pictures.  And how about that?  It only took me a whole month…

This was the last full day in Kiev; we left the apartment at 3 am the next morning to get to the airport, so this was the last chance for sightseeing and souvenir shopping.  I think it was also the hottest day of my week there; even Viktoria was too hot, and that hadn’t happened before.  (If anything, she was always cold, even when I thought it was refreshingly pleasant.)

The big outing of the day was to the museum of the Great Patriotic War — that’s what World War II is known as in Ukraine.  (Well, they do know it as WWII as well.)  Actually, it’s not accurate to say we went to the museum; we didn’t actually go into the museum, but walked the grounds instead.  This museum/memorial is where you’ll find the big statue that has been showing up in my previous photos.  The statue is called “Moma” (Viktoria made it quite clear that it wasn’t called “mama,” which is what you’d call your mother), and is the statue of the Motherland, or as Wikipedia notes, the “Mother of the Motherland.” As I’ve commented before, it is huge (about 100 ft. shorter than the Statue of Liberty) and visible for miles around Kiev.

One thing I kind of wish we had done was to visit the Afghanistan memorial.  In some ways, the Soviet involvement in Afghanistan in the 80s was similar to the US involvement in Vietnam.  I’ve seen the Vietnam Memorial in Washington, D.C., and it is very moving.  I only saw a little of the Afghanistan Memorial (from the door), but it too looked like it could have a lot of impact.  Oh well, maybe next time.  (I’m not a big fan of wars by any means, but I think it is important to recognize the significant losses they cause, so that they might be avoided in the future.)

Well, not much else to note, I guess.  It was a wide-ranging trip for me; a little more “touristy” than I usually do — I’m more interested in seeing (and, to some degree, experiencing) how people live in the places I visit — but still some great experiences.

Last Day

The heat over the past several days has kept me away from my computer, but I’m nearly done with the pictures; just one more post after this one.

A couple little sets from this day, which I refer to as my “short day” in Kiev.  As I noted in my daily posts, I had strained my ankle, and after walking on it for a couple days, I just had to rest it some.  So the activities for this particular day were cut a little short.

Really there were only two outings.  The first was a walk to Maidan Square where we caught the subway over to Kiev’s train station.  I have seen a couple train stations before — the one here in Portland, plus a couple in London — and this one was bigger than those, if you count both buildings, and the walkway that connected them.  Most of Ukraine gets around by train, although air travel is becoming more popular.  Trains are still a little more affordable, and generally pretty convenient.  (Perhaps on a future visit I’ll be able to take a train; I’d also like to rent a car, just ‘cuz.)

Most of the afternoon was down time, just reading and keeping my ankle elevated.  (I tried a little ice, but that didn’t help.)  After that bit of extra rest, things were better, so we set off in the evening to meet up with my friend Vladimir (or Vova, as he likes to be called).  He was nice enough to come in from the hinterlands of Kiev and we met up at the subway station in Podil.  We had a beer and some snacks, and it was just a lot of fun.  (Vova worked for a company that my company works with, but he had moved to Kiev a couple months before; his wife is from Kiev and she wanted to move home after finishing up her university work.)

So, a slightly rough day, but overall not too bad, and definitely a pleasant ending.  (Since I mention it in my photo captions, here’s a link to a page about banduras.)

Trains

Vova

As I think I noted in my trip posting, Kiev actually has two botanical gardens.  We went to the larger of the two, the National Gardens, so I’ll have to see the other one on a future visit.  The weather had been pretty decent, but really started to get warm on this day, so walking outside for a couple hours was probably not the best choice for that day.

The day started out quite nicely, with a stroll back down to and around Podil — hitting a couple churches on the way because, well, they are everywhere.  From Podil we caught a bus right to the gardens (pretty convenient) and then wandered around for a bit.  (Impress your friends!  The Russian word for garden is “sad,” with the “a” softened to be more like “ahh.”  Not quite like “sod,” but pretty close.)

Curiously, we spent a good deal of time at a zoological exhibit while visiting the botanical gardens.  It was somewhat interesting, but not really worth the separate admission.  Eh, what are you gonna do?  So there aren’t a lot of plant pictures, but there are plenty of animal and bug pictures.  (I didn’t get any pictures of the iguanas or boa constrictors; I had to draw the line somewhere.)

I also got a few pictures of one of the churches there before my camera battery died.  No trouble with the camera; I’d just forgotten to charge it up the night before.  This was the church where I got chided for sitting cross-legged in the vestibule (and no, I’m not going to make any jokes about sitting cross-legged in a church).

The trip home from the gardens involved riding a trolley bus for the first time.  The trolley buses are electric and get their juice from overhead wires.  The novelty was short-lived because it was, after all, a bus.  But we got off at Arsenal Metro station (so named for a small cannon mounted in front of the building) and took the subway the rest of the way home.  Fortunately, there wasn’t anything too interesting about the subway station, or I would have been even more bummed about having a dead camera.

Gardens