Without question, today has been the saltiest day of my life. Having spent the last several hours at a miniature “Dead Sea,” I feel like ham: thoroughly salted and baked. Apparently this small body of water used to connect to the Black Sea but became land locked a few years ago and has been getting saltier ever since. It’s fairly large: my guess is about one mile wide and two miles long, though I’m a very bad estimator of distances. At the deepest point it’s only waist high so you have to walk forever for the water to get even past your ankles.

This miniature “Dead Sea”, called Leman Kuyalnik, has several spas and places of healing built on its shores because the water and mud are supposedly very good for you. When we arrived there today, we layed out our blankets and towels on the salty ground (it wasn't like sand at all) and then headed into the water. For the first several feet, the ground was packed and dry, then it became like walking on really large corn flakes but it was salt. As we got closer to the water, the ground became even more white, covered in old footprints that collected salt crystals. Our feet sunk a little and the mud underneath the salt was rich black. When the water was ankle deep, the ground had a crusty top layer of salt--which your feet sank through immediately to the mud, which was about six inches deep. Looking back towards the shore, you could see a string of black circles in the water behind each person, where they had stepped and stirred up mud.

Eventually we got tired of walking and lay down in the water. The mud felt cool and clay-like, so we reached deep--grabbing handfuls, and started smearing it all over our arms and tummies. Before Zo and I came here, I found a few things on the internet about the healing qualities of the mud... so one of our goals was to have a mud bath when in Odessa. After today--mission accomplished! We covered out entire bodies with that crazy black mud! The kids didn't like it so they ran away from Zoe, Natasha and I as we made our transformation from girls in swimming suits to monsters from the deep.

After that, we made one trip back to shore for Volodya to take photos of us, then we walked far out and stayed in the water for an hour. The water splashed in my eyes once and it felt like fire! The concentration of salt in that water is incredible. I couldn't open my eyes for a few minutes as tears streamed down my face. Thank goodness my body had a natural defense mechanism to save my eyes before they burned out of their sockets because my salty fingers were no help!

We were just deep enough to float on our backs without touching the ground, so I let the wind drift me for awhile with my eyes closed. What a peaceful moment...

Back on shore, the salt crystallized on our skin. Everyone looked like they were covered in glitter! Little salt crystals collected on our arm hair. The drips down our legs dried as chunks of salt and when I scratched my skin--my fingernails filled with salt! Everyone also appeared to have bad dandruff--which of course was more salt. Our legs and arms also had lots of small scratches from floating and crawling around in the water and the ground being made of slightly sharp salt flakes. These wounds felt wonderful with all the salt...not!

One of Natasha's friends lives on the ridge directly next to this sea so we walked to her house to rinse off. As we walked up the trail, the novelty of our saltiness wore off quickly under the baking sun. I have never been so ready for a shower in my life!

A short taxi ride home, dinner of noodles and salad (which consists of: cabbage, chives, tomatoes, cucumbers, dill weed and oil), and now I'm off to finish watching a Russian movie from the 70's about a man who invented a time machine. What a beautiful life I lead :)