A Flickr of inspiration

While I'm on the subject, Culiuc.com had a report earlier this month about the celebration of the Moldovan holiday of Martisor in DC - Lucia Candu also blogged about it, all the way from Moldova! - and the attendant photo exhibit. I'm happy to say I participated in both the party and the exhibit, and people seemed to like a couple of my photos - the one of sunflowers displayed at the end of this post, the cats from this post, and this one:

Chişinău, Moldova, Aug. 7, 2006.

There's actually a great story that goes with this picture. I was on one of the streets bordering the lower side of the Piata Centrala in Chisinau and saw this photogenic car - an antique with a crate of melons on the trunk and melons spilling out of the back seat, plus a dog sleeping underneath it. As I was taking pictures of it, the car's owner (and melon salesman) approached me and told me I was the second person that day who to photograph it. We chatted for awhile, he offered me a free sample of melon and showed me a couple of features of the car (such as the homemade lock on the driver's-side door and collection of stickers on the dash), and it eventually turned out that he was from my wife's hometown and knew her parents. It's a small world, even smaller in a small country.

With such an opportunity, I should have been able to get a better shot of this car, which is a real classic (a GAZ-21, just like Putin's) and a definite "daily driver," as the classified ads in the States often say, meaning it's still in daily use - in this case, as a commercial vehicle. As it was, there were a bunch of people and some port-a-potties around, not to mention a couple of dogs, so perhaps there were just too many obstacles to achieving a better composition. Here's a picture of the car's interior, showing the homemade door lock and stickers, as well as a crumpled plastic woven bag, de rigeur at the market and also known locally as a "torba" or (still locally, but more broadly) as a "kitaiskaia sumka."


Note that Louis Vuitton has recently created a bag with a similar pattern (made of leather, natch - see the slideshow here), so the folks toting these bags at rynki and train stations across the former USSR (and indeed, throughout the Third World) have now become much hipper.

Anyway, I was inspired to finally get a Flickr account and upload all of the photos I presented at the Martisor part exhibit, "Memories of Moldova," into a single photoset. Hopefully, more Flickr activity and uploads will follow. Maybe I'll even figure out how to set up one of those cool sidebar widgets like Veronica has.