Walking through the picturesque village of Kupino, in Russia’s Belgorod region, the last thing you would expect to see is a large wooden replica of Sir Francis Drake’s legendary galleon, the Golden Hind. And yet, that’s exactly what a local carpenter has been building on top of his small workshop.

Growing up on the coast of Crimea, close to a naval base, Valeriy Vasilevich Kiku dreamed of one day building his own ship and going on a long voyage around the world. Along with other boys in the village, he would spend hours just watching the ships sailing in and out of port, and fantasying about life as a sailor. He never got to fulfill his dream, as he went to study at the Agricultural Institute and became an agronomist, but he never lost his passion for naval engineering.

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In an effort to draw attention to the poor state of roads in her home city of Saratov, a Russian model organized a professional photo shoot at one of the largest water-filled pot holes in her neighborhood, posing in a Baywatch bathing suit with a large inflatable flamingo.

Model/Fashion Blogger Anna Moskvicheva originally intended to have the photo shoot in the town of Mirny, where her aunt lives, but after heavy rains created giant road puddles right in her own city, she changed plans and had the photos taken on Tverskaya street, in Saratov. She put on a red Baywatch-style bathing suit, put on a large summer hat and stepped out into the flooded street to pose on a giant inflatable pink flamingo. The resulting photos have been shared on Russian social media thousands of times, with most people congratulating her on the original protest.

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If you thought your hairstylist was a little rough, you’ve probably never seen Russian hairdresser Daniil Istomin work. He taught himself to cut hair with a sharp hatchet instead of scissors, and while the process is allegedly very effective, it’s also about as brutal as you can imagine.

Like many other hairstylists, Daniil wanted to come up with an idea to set himself apart from the competition. Inspired by old stories about how rugged men once shaved their beards, he started experimenting with a very sharp axe about two years ago, and steadily improved his hair-cutting skills. He worked on mannequins at first, and as he built up his confidence, he started asking women if they’d  let him chop their head hair off. Some of them, the “crazy ones, as Daniil calls them, actually agreed.

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A 20-year-old man from Russia’s Sakhalin Oblast region recently made national headlines after being declared the winner of a women’s lingerie photo contest organized by a popular store chain.

Andrey Nagorny, a resident of Yuzhno-Sakhalinsk, heard of the online photo contest through his girlfriend. Aware of his feminine features, they decided to take a few photos of Andrey wearing some sexy women’s lingerie and enter them into the contest, just for fun. Andrey’s girlfriend, whose name has not been made public, fixed his hair and did his makeup before asking a talented photographer to snap some rather professional-looking photos of him and submitting them to the contest organizer online. They expected to get a good laugh out of the whole thing, but what they didn’t expect was for Andrey to be declared the winner.

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Nikita Golubev, aka ProBoyNick, is a talented illustrator from Moscow, Russia, who experiments with a variety of mediums, the most interesting of which is definitely dirt-covered cars in the Russian capital.

Proving that one man’s filthy car is another’s canvas, Golubev unleashes his artistic talents on dirt-covered cars he finds around Moscow, beautifying them with detailed landscapes, animal portraits and religious quotes that he scribbles into the layer of filth using his finger. It definitely beats having someone write “wash me” on your dirty car.

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With Easter only a couple of days away, there’s no better time for Christians to draw closer to God, and a Russian luxury goods company wants to help rich folks do just that with a collection of gold-plated iPhone 7s engraved with religious symbols and prayers, and blessed by an Orthodox bishop.

Caviar Phone has been creating limited edition gold-plated smartphones for a few years, even making international headlines in 2014 for a Putin-themed iPhone aimed at rich Russian patriots. But what really caught my eye was its Caviar Credo collection featuring the same type of gold-plated iPhones but this time engraved with Orthodox symbols like crosses and holy icons, and prayers like “Our Father”. Credo also includes Apple smartwatches with similar decorations.

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A resident of St. Petersburg, Russia, decided to teach his wife a lesson for legally changing her name without his permission, by having her precious car filled with concrete.

In a bizarre video filmed with a mobile phone, the man, whose name has not yet been revealed, can be seen directing a cement truck as it backs up towards his wife’s car and positioning the chute through the window, before ordering the driver to fill it up with concrete. The video quickly went viral online, transcending Russian borders and leaving viewers wondering what on Earth made this guy do a thing like that.

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26-year-old Anna Cherdantseva, from the city of Ufa, in Russia’s Bashkortostan Republic is a full-time sofa tester, spending up to 10 hours every day trying out new sofas for comfort and safety.

Last month, Russian furniture giant MZ5 Group announced that it was taking application for a new position – full-time sofa tester. Although all new products are tested in a specialized laboratory, management decided that in order to better meet the needs of consumers it needed some feedback on real-life use of its sofas. In just a few days, MZ5 received over 5,000 job applications from people eager to spend most of their time sitting and lying on sofas.

“We were selected candidates in several stages,” MZ5 Group spokesperson Anastasia Russkih said. “Initially we checked their CVS, and then we let them tell us why they wanted the job.” Eventually, the furniture company shortlisted just 7 candidates, out of which Anna Cherdantseva, a 26-year-old marketing expert, proved to be the most suitable for the job.

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For the last 8 year, about 200 residents of Strunino, a small town in Russia’s Vladimir Oblast region have not had to worry about buying bread, thanks to the generosity of a local grocery store owner who has been giving it away for free.

Mamoud Shavershyan came to Russia, from Armenia, 25 years ago. He worked as an engineer, before setting up his own business, a small grocery store no different than other such stores in Strunino. But everything changed one day, 8 years ago when, sitting behind the counter, Mamoud saw an old lady counting dozens of coins to pay for a couple of loaves of bread. He found it humiliating for the pensioner and ended up giving her the bread for free. That day, he made the decision to print coupons that pensioners in Strunino could exchange for white or black bread at his store. To make sure that people knew about his offer he advertised it a local paper.

But that was only the beginning. Soon, Mamoud extended his generous offer to people with disabilities, large families with low income, and the generally poor. News spread like wildfire, and soon poor people from neighboring villages started coming by his shop to receive coupons. Today, the “Eric” grocery store in Strunino gives away around 2,000 loaves of white bread and 1,000 loaves of black bread, every month. They also regularly donate gingerbread to local kindergartens, and to coupon holders during holidays. And for their kindness, Mamoud and his family are “rewarded” with insults, racial slurs and accusations of theft…

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Game2:Winter is an upcoming reality TV show where 30 participants will compete against themselves and the dangers of the Siberian wilderness – including brown bears and extreme temperatures – for a prize of $1.7 million. But the most shocking thing about this show is that, just like in the Hunger Games, “everything is allowed, fighting, alcohol, murder, rape, smoking, anything.”

News about this seemingly brutal reality show first broke out about a month ago, but reports were coming mostly from obscure news outlets and the whole idea seemed so extreme that I was pretty sure it was nothing more than a prank. Then I read that contestants had to survive until April 1st, 2018 – April Fools’ Day – and I was convinced it was fake. But the news never really went away, and now the Siberian Times newspaper announced that this Russian real-life version of the Hunger Games is actually happening, and it promises to be just as ruthless.

Ever since watching the hit TV series ‘Lost’, 35-year-old Yevgeny Pyatkovsky, a millionaire from Novosibirsk, Russia, had been wanting to create a reality show about surviving in the Siberian taiga, with little, to no help from the outside world. Now, thanks to technological advancements in surveillance equipment and online streaming, he is ready to make his idea a reality.

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With Women’s Day just around the corner, social networks like Instagram and VKontakte have become flooded with ads from Russian entrepreneurs offering women in Moscow the chance to rent impressive 101-rose bouquets and designer shopping bags for 10-minute photo shoots.

If your boyfriend is cheap, but you want to spark the envy of all your girlfriends without actually breaking the bank, or if you just want to make your boyfriend jealous, and you live in Moscow, Russia, there are a number of online services that you can use to have a gorgeous bouquet and an expensive-looking gift delivered at your doorstep for a 10-minute photo session. You can then post the pics online on March 8 and watch everyone go green with envy.

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The machine-dominated world envisioned by James Cameron in “Terminator” once seemed like pure science fiction, but now, not so much. Just a few days ago, a Russian programmer from Perm unveiled his 3D-printed version of the T-800 robot featured in Cameron’s famous blockbuster, and while it can currently only move its head, it is equipped with a “brain” that allows it to speak and even answer various questions, by looking up the answers on the internet.

Perm-based programmer Alexander Osipovich knew he wanted to one day build his own Terminator robot as a child, after watching the 1984 movie featuring Arnold Schwarzenegger. In 2009, while studying programming at university, Osipovich started working on a program that would one day act as the brain of his real-life T-800 machine. Over the next two years, he developed multiple versions of it in Visual Basic, and in 2011 he decided that technology had come far enough to allow him to fulfill his childhood dream.

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Alexander Batyokhtin, a 41-year-old man from the Siberian village of Sosnovka, spent six weeks shaping around 12 cubic meters of fresh snow into a three-meter high church, where his fellow villagers can now to say a prayer and light a candle.

There is no real church in Sosnovka, or in any of the nearby villages, for that matter, and people who want to visit a place of worship have to drive for tens of kilometers to the city of Omsk. This is often an impossible task for the sick and the elderly, and it was this unfortunate situation that inspired Alexander to use the most abundant resource in his village to build a temporary church. He had worked in construction for years, and even though he was forced to retire after being diagnosed with a serious illness, the man was determined to offer Sosnovka a place to celebrate Christmas and Epiphany in properly.

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A young tattoo artist in Yekaterinburg, Russia, has been getting a lot of criticism on social media after a video of him inking his pet Sphynx cat recently went viral. To make matters worse, the owner admitted that this was not the animal’s first tattoo, and probably not the last.

The owner of the hairless cat admits that he is basically forcing the animal to share his passion for tattoos. “Of course, I feel sorry for tattooing her, because it’s not something she wants,” he says in the video. But apparently the temptation to turn the Sphynx into a walking, meowing work of art is too great. Bes already sports a large tattoo on her back, featuring a woman, a deck of cards, a prison tower and a cigarette, and in this video her owner adds a star as well.

The Yekaterinburg artist said that tattoos are a bit harder to do because the cat’s skin is a bit different than a human’s, but added that he doesn’t believe the procedure is harmful for the cat. “This isn’t her first tattoo,” he says. “She just goes under and doesn’t feel a thing. She always wakes up fine from the anesthesia and behave normally after that.”

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For years, Ussuri Bay, on Russia’s Pacific shoreline, was a dumping ground for glass bottles and waste from a nearby porcelain factory. But nature found a way to turn lemons into lemonade, and today, all those unwanted materials have been shaped into a colorful glass beach.

The story goes that many years ago, truckloads of glass and porcelain were dumped in Ussuri Bay, but instead of what should have been a landfill for unwanted waste, Steklyashka beach is actually one of the most stunning tourist attractions in the world. Years of erosion have rounded and polished the pieces of glass and porcelain into beautiful pebbles of various colors and have turned this place into a wonderland reminiscent of California’s Glass Beach.

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