I do not recall ever being too invested in model assembly kits. Surely in my childhood I received a fair share of constructor set gifts, and seem to vaguely remember assembling a model navy cruiser when I was in elementary school. But nothing that I can point to in the…
Majority of my readers would most likely not know Mottingham. Do you mean Nottingham, of Robin Hood fame?… Native Londoners may recognize the name of the village but give me a quizzical look as to why I would choose to highlight a rather nondescript location instead of one of hundreds…
Fun trips are coming thick and fast in the second half of this year for me. I am still several photo-essays away from completing the story of our summer trip to Catalonia, I just returned from a jaunt around California wine country, and there I am in Madrid for a…
We interrupt the current stream of travel vignettes in order to celebrate a truly momentous occasion: the 10th birthday of my online journal. It is no testament to either perseverance or superior writing that the blog, started as the written record of our expatriate experiences, has survived our subsequent repatriation,…
As banquet photographs go, it was a pretty good one. Anyone who’s ever been to a Russian restaurant party will recognize the concept. There is always an “affiliated photographer” who moves from table to table taking pictures of the party-goers. He or she then tries to sell the printed portraits…
If you clicked to the website in the last couple of days, you probably noticed that things have changed a bit. Ok, not a bit – a lot! Part of the reason for this was that the last time I re-decorated had been over 7 years ago – an updated…
My blogging angle has clearly become almost exclusively travel-oriented, and any self-respecting travel blogger has to have a list of his favorite travel movies. So here is my attempt to establish bona fides. I set out with the goal of picking not just the movies filmed in gorgeous locations but…
It only took me a couple of months, but nearly 300 pictures from the recent Italian trip can be found in a dozen location-specific albums in my Flickr photostream.
Due to the quirks of the UK tax calendar that I described in the past, having not lived in the country for four and a half years, I would be due to file a tax return for only the third fiscal year in which I have had zero UK income…
We live half an hour away from Six Flags Great Adventure amusement park in Jackson, NJ. Every year, we would buy a family season pass to the place. The economics are pretty straight-forward: A single visit to the park is so expensive that even if you go just twice during…
So I made it to my vanity goal – this is my 1000th post. It took me six and a half years, a pace of roughly 3 posts every week. Surprisingly, this is very close to the pace I initially established at the beginning of this endeavor, but obviously well…
This is not a new clip, it’s been around for nearly two years. In fact, I am pretty sure that most of my audience have seen it in the past. But it’s wa-a-a-y cool. And absent any original thought at this here blog, it certainly serves as a an upgrade…
I am ashamed to admit that I completely forgot today’s date and its significance up until the point that the public address system came on at 9:25am to say that “the firm would like to observe a minute of silence in honor of the events of September 11, 2001”. On…
On one of the rare nowadays intraday weekend excursions, we went for the first time to New Jersey’s Grounds for Sculpture, in Hamilton Township, about 45 minutes drive away from our house. It is a sizable park that contains open-air exhibition of several hundred post-modern works of art (plus a…
A recent article in Salon reminded me of something I briefly mentioned during the Beijing Games four years ago and then expounded upon during the Vancouver Winter Games two years ago. In one recent two-hour stretch of primetime viewing, I managed to see several final serves of a volleyball match,…
With apologies to my non-Russian-speaking readers, the content of this post has little meaning to those who do not have ancestors or relatives who fought in the World War II in the Red Army. Because of that, I decided to write in Russian for once. С подачи Наташиного брата Лёши,…
Going through recent Oscar contenders, I find another movie that I like well enough but do not hold worthy of an Oscar consideration. It gave me a glimpse into inner workings of a baseball franchise, which I always find fascinating (although I have little doubt that the eponymous book on…
Last weekend we went for a movie screening of the Beatles’ Yellow Submarine, shown as part of New York International Children’s Film Festival. Lifelong Beatles fan that I am, I have never actually seen the movie in its entirety before, so it was a treat (followed up by a nice…
It is brilliantly made. It deserves all of those non-acting Oscars that it received and probably a couple more (I loved the score and the overall editing was superb, but those two awards went elsewhere). And it directly speaks to our love of cinematography as a magical art form –…