Ukrainian Sunday: A Random Picture Collection From Odessa

Roughly every month I collect the photos that didn't quite get their own post and bring them together in a single post.  Past collection can be found here.  

I've only been out of Ukraine for a little more than a month but emotionally and mentally it seems much much longer.  Nevertheless, I still have a bunch of posts about Ukraine and our last few weeks there and so I thought I would post one of these older updates each Sunday until I'm all caught up.  To start, here are some of the photos taken from Odessa.  

One of the weirder Eastern European tourism traditions is that when there are busy open public squares there will inevitably be a group of men holding doves who will walk up to you and try to get you to hold them for money.   The "dove guys" near the famous Potemkin Steps stepped it up a notch as they had an eagle that you could have your photo taken with.  

Some of the walls needed a little help around the Potemkin Steps.

The steps are designed to be an optical illusion which you can see in this photo.  Between sets of stairs there is a landing but as you stand at the bottom you are only able to see the steps up and so it looks like one long staircase.

The port of Odessa.

A lighthouse on the Black Sea.

This statue waits for you at the top of the Potempkin Steps and is of Armand-Emmanuel de Vignerot du Plessis who was the first governor of Odessa.  He was a French royalist who in lived in exile after the French Revolution and joined the Russian military and rose to the rank of Major General.

 If you are a tourist in Odessa you must get your photo taken sitting on this monument to the novel The Twelve Chairs by Ilf and Petrov.

A roof was put on top of this street and created a nice little shopping mall.

Some high stakes chess matches held in a park near the apartment we rented.

While walking down a street we noticed a monument down an alleyway and behind a gate.

That's never stopped us from getting to a historical marker.  It turned out to be a memorial to Ludwig Lazarus Zamenhof who created the Esperanto in 1887.

This is the Museum of Western and Eastern Art and in 2008 two thieves broke in and stole a painting by Caravaggio.  The piece was called The Taking Of Christ and was recovered in 2010.

 A memorial to sailors lost in the Black Sea.

Another view of the port of Odessa.

Another in a long line of World War II memorials.

One afternoon we made our way to one of the beaches that during the summer months is standing room only.  

The sun even came out for a few minutes.