'The Sloppy Arab Food Before the Long Bus Ride'

A bus driver or organizer is smeared with sauce from an Arab flatbread sandwich

while his woman pampers him before his Mercedes Sprinter (LIUKX) luxury

jitney bus awaits taking passengers from Kyiv train station to regional Rivne,

Ukraine. Your ratings, critiques and observations are invited and most welcome.

If you rate harshly, very critically, or wish to make an observation, please submit

a helpful and constructive comment; please share your photographic knowledge

to help improve my photography. Thanks! Enjoy! john

This is a real 'sloppy slice of life' isn't it?

Glad you like it.

john

John (Crosley)

Notice the woman taking care of her man.  He may not care about dripping sauce, but she certainly does, and she's going to make sure that he is kempt and presentable.  I've met him, and he's a nice guy as well as wifey.

john

John (Crosley)

Looks like the lone stander after a hamburger eating contest. Doesn't really seem that pleasant for either of them. Would never have realized this was Arab food either.

This is the jitney bus driver from the Kyiv central train station to Rivne Ukraine which benefits from bus service, though trains go there too, but on a more rigid schedule.

He is tired, since he makes the round trip at least once daily, rain, snow, ice, or shine, and probably every day of the year, possibly with a fill-in driver if he gets horribly sick.

Ukrainian workers not in offices often work until 6 or 7 at night from early morning for small salaries (ultra small in many instances) and often six or even seven days a week.  

Those not in essential industries often get drunk during time off during New Year's and winter holidays such as Christmas (Eastern - celebrated Jan. 7,2017).    During that time many households are in a stupor -- not all by any means -- but it's a time NOT to be responsible, as all the rest of their time for the rest of the year is spoken for.

The food is called Shoarma, a Middle Eastern concoction of flat bread and chicken with salad and dressing marinated and roasted on an infrared spit in a huge 'roast-like' concoction instead of lamb which is traditionally middle eastern -- it's cheaper and virtually no one in Ukraine eats lamb - the traditional Middle Eastern dish - just too expensive.

Shoarma is found throughout Ukraine as is Shashlik, a rarer, but delicious Middle Eastern barbecue that often uses lamb and is incredibly tasty but NOT fast food generally (sometimes in Moscow the Shashlik I ate was roasted over an outdoor barrel burner and made of pork, enough to make any Arab or Jew cringe!  Things in Moscow have modernized greatly since then, however, and the standard of living has hugely increased.

There were sound reasons for dietary restrictions for both Muslims and Jews.

Swine-borne Trichinosis could and did kill.  A former Soviet military doctor I knew in Russia lost half his troops in the military to that disease after a pork meal, and could not treat it a half century ago, but now it's treatable.

Eating no pork was the prevention.

Now in Dnipro (formerly Dnepropetrovsk) the best pork steak I have ever eaten is served consistently grilled over charcoal by a restaurant that I found is Jewish.  I inquired how Jews could serve pork, and they said 'We're Ashkenazim . . . . so?"  (European Jews . . . not upholding dietary restrictions).  

Makes my mouth water just to think of it.  numh.

Of course, this is a 'slice of life' photo, a true document of one moment in Ukraine life dissected.

I'm glad to see you have drilled through my photos to find such little noticed but dear to me photos.

john

John (Crosley)

I always think of you when I think of that decisive moment with street photography. You are truly the Cartier-Bresson of our time. You're imagery forms a foundation of my experiences here in San Francisco and Berkeley during the 60's. I will never forget the image of the guardsman in full gas mask with bayonet drawn in front of the huge crowd at People's Park. You can almost smell the tear gas again. Hope we are not entering into another repeat age of tumultuousness with our current house of politics. Looks like many of us will need to come out of retirement and help to re-energize the activism of old.
I also really like what's happening with your Image Brief website. It is interesting and draws the viewer in for more. Happy New Year and let me know how your doing on the health front too? I posted the info to Facebook as well as sending you a few dollars. Hope it returns to you 100 fold. 

First and foremost even being mentioned in the same sentence as le maitre, Henri Cartier-Bresson is the crown jewel of any comment  that could be made about my photography, and the photo you mention was deemed 'not worthy' at the time for publication as it was 'too trite' and 'too ordinary' rather than cops or national guard chasing with clubs screaming, protesting students (and) anti-war demonstrators, as they were not always the same.   Some were students, some were anti-war demonstrators, and some were both.  In any case, there were a huge number of them, and by the time that photo was taken, the People's Park situation/demonstration, had turned peaceful, or a sort, though later it would boil again and again, as anniversaries rolled around, etc.

I'm so happy you have followed my work since I have come to Photo.net, as the work shown mostly sat in a box never seen by others except a very select few (and most of them bored to look at those photos from 'long ago, but when someone was interested, particularly of the opposite sex, I knew that was a person I was interested in'.  

And a few were, but ultimately not the woman I married for 17 years who was wonderful in many ways but harbored an innate fear that photography would lead me to finding a beautiful model and away from her .. . . . .so out came platefuls of cookies left all over and despite clear instructions not to do so, she did so anyway, and I just could not help myself with those calories. She meant well and was pretty terrific in many regards, and I even sent her (as she had before) to law school, where her personality changed as had mine before, and it wasn't for the better, and from a fairly wealthy, comfortable existence in Silicon Valley as a leader, (both of us actually) we became another law school spouse statistic, an odd we thought we could overcome.   Wishful thinking.

I've privately been making books of my 1/2 to 1 million photos, each with a different theme and the Berkeley Nat'l Guard photo figures prominently in one as a major historical photo.

Nixon in another.

Negatives are lost to time, but I have great prints, scanned from exhibition style prints and worth their weight for me in gold; I did some pretty darn good (but sparse) shooting at that time, in my early - mid 20s just before marriage including time spent in Viet Nam (all work now lost), and campus riot work, almost all lost.

I rigorously protect and catalog all my work on abotu 45 hard drivs and from 2-3 cloud services with two going bankrupt in the past year, so I'm stuck uploading more backups to a new service, this one by Amazon, and that seems to be working, but the test is when it comes to downloading, and Amazon will NEVER agree to toring hundreds of terabytes of (mostly copies of copies of copies) of my photos, so I'm just sending them copies of 'worked on' photo files -- sometimes updated every month or so, then painstakingly and slowly uploaded though at huge rate of upload speed as my Internet service is  terrific.

I have had several health issues, but the worse was when I thought I was getting better, was ambulating well and a flight attendant let go of a loaded, heavy serving cart on a plane with nose up that went crashing into my knee causing met to be unable to walk.

It's been that way for nearly two months with little improvement -- I'm getting worried.

LensCulture contests have drawn my attention since a Lucie Award winning mentor went disabled after planning and grooming me to enter the gallery world; their write-ups and critiques of my work have been most heartening with suggestions that my work is 'fantastic' (by one) that I know it is 'fantastic' (same one) and a refusal even to discuss the quality of my work, but only how to disseminate it to the art world at large, such as galleries and museums worldwide -- and that reviewer, an anonymous industry professional said it was worthy. Other reviewers have said much the same thing though more veiled terms, but enthusiastically and very helpfully.  

If I can get entry fees (a problem) and transportation and printing and transportation costs together, I would like to enter portfolio reviews at major venues and various competitions as suggested to make a 'network' -- I've been told my work is 'singular' even among 'street' work, and is 'different' and would be well received.  Reviewers from the 'art' industry seem to review it and receive it very well.

I never intended this result, but now I WANT it.

We'll see if money is a constraining factor.

First thing is to get my medicine.

I'm still stuck in Eastern Europe, and despite your generous gift, the money has NOT been rolling in and I am on a very, very meager pension.

I am most thankful for your comment which I just found this date -- on the last day of Obama's presidency the only thing to put a smile on my face.

And I'm for protesting.

In my way, with a camera.

See you on the streets.

In our wheelchairs.

;~))

A very grateful

john

John (Crosley)

lawyerauthor (insert at sign) yahoo.com