Pripyat gymnasium and swimming pool Azure.

This was the main center for sports and recreation in Pripyat at the time. These facilities were still used up until 1998 (some 12 years after the accident) by plant workers, scientists and other people who were still working in the zone. Now, like everything else, it has been completely looted and trashed.

Pripyat school #2 library and partial collapse of middle school #1.

There were many schools and kindergartens in Pripyat, and I have visited three of them over my two trips. The library (pictured above) as it stands today is three or four feet deep in books on the floor, which is quite a sight. All windows are broken and the room looks like something from a war zone. This made me feel a little emotional as it seems such a tragic waste that this place will never teach or hear the quiet whispers of young children ever again. All the corridors of the schools were equally unsettling with remnants of an ex-soviet regime scattered everywhere -- from posters of what to do in the event of a possible cold war U.S. attack to children's gas masks littering the floors. This area had a big effect on me. In the right photograph you can see four floors from school #1 which collapsed in July 2005.

School nursery.

Gas masks in middle school #3 halls were kept in case of a cold war U.S. nuclear attack.