Author Archives: mrmakdeck

Photo of the Day – Svoge, Bulgaria

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Adrian, a fellow cyclopedian, taking a higher resolutioned image of the beautiful scenery.

 

Svoge. A town like many others where we stopped to enjoy the lush scenery for a few, idling moments, just enough time to catch our breaths and then we were off, down another hill or along the side of another mountain pass. Time is so crucial when you’re on two wheels and have some place to be. You can’t meander as much as you’d like to meander, you can’t bask as much as you’d like to bask. But it gives you a postcard, a reminder of where you’d like to return to. I’d like to return to Svoge.

After conquering a few days before of torrential down pour, that made it so the road and the sky were one, constant, grey, maniacal flood, it was nice to have a middle of the road weather day, not too hot, not too cloudy, not to wet. The Bulgarian country side was new to us as we headed through beautifully lush, jutting cliffs, switchbacks that seemingly played tricksters, luring you to plunge from wheel or panier first into the brown, slow moving Iskar River below. Towns like this in the Sophia province, seemed to appear out of no where around every bend, looking like small hamlets, yet a bit more sterile and grey in architecture. It was quite a surprise that the lead up to Sophia, the capital, was miniscule, off tune slide whistle, as opposed to a whole cavalcade of wind instruments, blowing, red in the face, with victory!

Photo of the Day – My Grandma or A Witch in Daylight

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I could hear her from 200 feet away, crystal clear.

Sometimes is odd running into the stereotypical image of what some people think of a place in the flesh. When many people think of Russia, an image of this lady appears. She is bent over, she is kerchiefed, she has a few teeth here and there. This is in Kiev, Ukraine and from this distance, this woman did look like either my grandmother, a small, Jewish woman who would feed you until your stomach would burst, never taking no as an answer, or a witch, who….oddly would do the same thing to your stomach, except cook you and eat you before it got to the bursting point. There were many ladies like this in the Ukraine and you could tell from a single glance that they were the backbones of their families. Hard worked, constantly aware, and with voices to conquer all banshee wails, these old school woman demanded your attention, deserved your respected, and ignited your imagination. I couldn’t help but thinking of Fiddler on the Roof the entire time I was there. I felt that I was returning to my roots, my past, and even if I couldn’t communicate with it, I could look to it to see what these old black and white photos of strangers who were related by blood looked like in color and in motion and in sound. Truly a place I would want to take my children to see, not just for the buildings, or the rustic country, but for the well endowed culture and past that I feel very connected to.

Photo of the Day – Chimney Sweep

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Apologies for the delay…working on a few new films had me on a twitter/blog/photo of the day hiatus. No more! New Episode next week! And of course…a photo of the day.

Really. He looks friendly enough. What's the beef?

Really needs an explanation, but I don’t have one. Posted on the entrance to a park in Moscow. I presume it means no homeless people, but maybe they have a stigma about chimney sweeps. Possibly that when they band together they tend to put on terrible cockney accents and dance and sing late into the evening on people’s roofs.