On the way back home from the hospital, we made a detour and walked through the Republican Stadium and the tennis courts above it - I spent a good part of my childhood over there (9 photos):



It all looks very neglected, but more so to Mishah, who doesn't have an almost physical memory of, say, the broken-down concrete stairs that have been there for as long as I remember myself.

An almost physical memory of everything that's still there from my childhood: a mirror on the wall; a bench with a soft seat made of brown artificial leather; an 85-year-old nurse, Valentina Alekseevna, a woman of amazing energy, who used to swim in the freezing Black Sea in Yalta in early March and who seems not to have changed a bit - she just grew smaller, as old people do, and she still works at the tennis courts, sitting indoors, drawing numbers on the little thingies that they later attach to the locker keys.

The lockers are all new, and many other things there have also changed, of course.