Kaluga Kitsch

When we lived in Moscow, we were lucky enough to have a friend who had a house on the outskirts of Kaluga which she used as a dacha. One of my favorite parts of visiting the city was going to the central market. Here are a few photos - focusing on some of the cool signage - from July 2005:

The boat in the picture is named "Chernomorets"

The painting at left could easily be sold at any number of
Moscow galleries as nostalgia-inducing, Soviet-kitschy art.

More photos from that day - including lots of the painted products on mirrors like the cabbage in the image above - in this Flickr set.

Kaluga, before the storm

July 16, 2005.

One of my favorite photos of the past two years, mainly because of the circumstances surrounding it. We were spending the weekend at a friend's so-called dacha (actually a house on the outskirts of a medium-sized city, so not the classic rural dacha one imagines) in Kaluga and went to one of the local lakes to celebrate someone's birthday. Not five minutes after this photo was taken, we were all huddling in a car (and unluckier members of our party were huddling underneath a rubber raft and some towels outside) for shelter from a huge thunderstorm.