A Country of Brides

Dearest readers,

When I wrote that Ukraine was a country rife with brides, I wasn't one of them! An alert reader asked if that was my way of being coy, but it was just my way of being literal -- every day of the week the place is crawling with wedding parties being photographed in front of landmarks and especially picturesque trees, usually with an open bottle of Soviet champagne in tow.

As you can see, I was desperate to capture this phenomenon but didn't have the derring-do to just point and shoot, so the Comrade was pressed into service as my decoy. What that means is that here you miss the high points: the groom in the first photo who very gallantly swept his new wife off that T-70 tank; the bride in the second photo who, minutes before I snapped that picture, was sighing and smoking in front of the vending machine, carefully ashing outside the perimeter of her lame-trimmed gown*;or the day at Lavra monastery in Kiev, when there were at least a dozen brides swanning around in all that saturated blue.

* And seconds after I snapped that picture, she was being photographed in front of City Hall with her bridesmaid, back to arched back, in a girl-on-girl pose that I'm going to kindly refer to here as softcore, while the groom and groomsman stood placidly by.