On of the days we took Luisa to the street where I grew up. We moved there when I was five and stayed there until I went to college. My parents moved to a more downtown location right after I graduated and I actually haven’t been to the area since then. The area is what they call a “microrayon” in Russia (lit. “microregion”). Those are usually neighborhoods constructed around the same time and meant to be reasonably complete. (I.e., they design them with stores, schools, kindergartens.) Instead of being of having a grid of streets, they typically have scattered highrises and a tree of roads that branches until to the highrises. (It’s a lot like Escondido Village at Stanford.) The microrayon’s had numbers instead of names – ours was

64 if I remember correctly. The street, however, had a name –

“Patrice Lumumba”. It has since been renamed – there was some excuse, but I think people largely just didn’t like the African name. (A Patrice Lumumba street in a different city was renamed because the name of “the Latin American revolutionary” was found “hard to pronounce” – so, American’s aren’t the only geographically- and linguistically-challenged people on this planet.)

Friends who bought my parent’s old appartment from them invited us in, so I also took some pictures of the ocean view that we enjoyed for over 10 years. (See the third row.)