Dark, damp, and gray in Tbilisi, Georgia, +2 in the afternoon and sometimes slightly frosty at night. Not fun. Sitting indoors, looking through folders with old photos...
...This was in St. Petersburg, Russia in hot summer 2021. On a city web portal, I had read that there had been huge crowds at local beaches, and I was hurrying to take images of that historical pandemonium, riding the old town streets on a shabby bicycle, sweating as hell.
What I saw struck me, especially considering that it was during the pandemic:
Like a scene in a zombie apocalypse movie, I thought.
Not only the sand but the water was densely taken by recreation.
It wouldn't be a surprise if it was Croatia or Montenegro but here... That beach was empty in a normal year. It's even forbidden to swim there. Dirty sand, grey shallow waters, the sea bottom might have anything including broken glass and rusty construction things...
Russians didn't travel in 2020 because of coronavirus restrictions and had no chance for that in 2021 either; people were craving for sunbathing on the beach – any beach. And here is the result.
I was not eager to go into the midst of the crowd so I took a position on a pedestrian bridge rising above a part of the beach, and began observing the beachgoers, taking pictures with a telephoto lens.
I quickly discovered an interesting scene. A young woman sunbathing topless and her unhappy companion.
Watching them, I composed a theory of what was happening. The girl invited the guy to hang out together on the beach but she didn't mention that her plan was to be without a bra. The man was not happy with it: such recreation in a public place will certainly attract attention of police (and potentially some evil passersby).
Eventually, policemen came - someone called them perhaps, probably with the justification "we came to the beach with children, and, here, the woman is naked."
I couldn't hear the conversation but I saw that the woman didn't resist long and, maintaining self-confidence, put on the bra. The couple luckily wasn't taken into a police station.
At this point, the paparazzi (your obedient servant) was spotted by a group of males, probably, guys from Central Asia. This was how they reacted:
I was revealed, and I couldn't stay at the position longer. I cycled a bit towards the beach but, then, experienced agoraphobia. Too many people, too cramped, everything was "too". I turned back home to have a cool shower and to drink something from the fridge...
...I don't know what meteorologists are paid for: their forecasts fail too often. They've promised +12 and the sunny weather in Tbilisi but, outside the window, there is the same dullness, dampness, and +2. Keep watching archives and dreaming about walks when the sun eventually appears.
I took these images with a Nikkor 70-300mm on a full-frame DSLR Nikon D750 on June 20, 2021 in St. Petersburg, Russia.