Snowy Whites in Russia, 2006
Photos from my time abroad
This is a special story. These are not my most beautiful snow photos from a technical perspective, but they are important and meaningful to me: these photos are from my semester abroad in St. Petersburg, Russia from January — May, 2006.
I took these photos on the most affordable point and shoot digital camera Walmart had to offer at the time. In fact, it was my first ever digital camera. Facebook was brand new and not the repository of experiences that it is today. I didn’t edit or share my trip photos, and they were more or less lost on an old external hard drive that is buried in my desk drawer.
Until today.
There are many more yet to sort through, but here are a few that serve to represent the snowy weather of that time, at least a little bit. For context, I want to share that I found myself in St. Petersburg during the coldest winter on record since WWII, with temperatures at times plummeting to -40— so cold that Fahrenheit and Celsius line up! When I left the warmth of the Pulkovo airport, a program co-director in a large fur coat gathered me up in a hurry, saying, “Please, get in the van— you can actually freeze to death!”
And we were off.
