Travel notes are a mobile, almost flying genre, wandering between a magazine essay and a personal diary. The author of the book was attracted by precisely this genre property: the high-speed ability to keep up with visual sensations, which always run far ahead in unfamiliar terrain, in new geography. “Traveling partly returns a person to a “primitive state”: he is surrounded by things that have no names,” writes Mikhail Aizenberg in one of the essays included in the book. Vision takes snapshots of reality, but they cannot be shared without verbal commentary, whose main task is to retain the first impression, not to erase it with tourist clichés and guidebook instructions