It always seems to take me a while to get my travel pictures up.  Last time, with my Kiev trip, it took nearly a month.  This time it was just a week (OK, ten days), so I’m kind of getting better.

I actually didn’t take too many pictures on this trip.  Since we were in Kiev for only a couple days, and in the same part of town as before, there really wasn’t anything to take a picture of.  (In hindsight, given the continuing protests that have been happening, it might have been nice to get a shot or two of those first gatherings.)  Then, with most of the rest of my trip being in Mariupol — again, a place where I’ve taken plenty of pictures — there wasn’t a whole lot of camera work needed.

The big things were the wedding and the Thanksgiving dinner with my new Ukrainian family that happened the night before, and those I have pictures of.  Most of the photos have captions, so be sure to click and zoom in to read my comments.

There were two times I really wished I had had my camera with me and ready to go.  The first instance was the “farmer’s market” where we picked up some groceries. The fish was very fresh (in some cases, still moving) and the meat/butcher area would probably convince vegetarians they had made the right choice (and maybe pick up a few converted carnivores).  It was really something to see.

The other time I really wanted my camera was on the bus from the airport into Kiev on my last day. We passed by an office building that had really done a spectacular job on their holiday lights.  It was truly impressive.  Of course, to get that shot I would have have needed to know it was coming up and had my camera at the ready, but I didn’t know it was there and didn’t have my camera out, so it remains just a fleeting image from a moving bus window.  (Unless I can find a photo online, which I haven’t yet been able to.)

I did take a couple photos of my apartment in Mariupol, but since those look almost exactly the same as the ones at the booking agency site, I thought I’d just point you to those. Here you go. It turned out to be a pretty nice place, so if you’re ever going to Mariupol, you might consider staying there.

Now, on to the pictures. The first gallery is the photos taken by the “house photographer” at the wedding hall. We only got 5 prints, but given the photos, I kind of wish we’d gotten the full package. (Viktoria didn’t think we needed any, so 5 photos was a compromise; the full package would only have been 100 UAH more — about $12.)

The second gallery is of the photos taken by my camera, sometimes with me at the helm, sometimes with others.  There’s a little overlap of the wedding images, but it’s kind of neat to have the same photo from different angles.

Wedding Photographer

My Camera