Participants take part in the annual Great Spitalfields Pancake Race in aid of London's Air Ambulance in London, Britain February 9, 2016. (Photo by Stefan Wermuth/Reuters)

Only the most intrepid urban explorers cross the tattered ruins of the old Iron Curtain to endure the excessive bureaucracy, military paranoia and freezing winds of the East to hunt for the ghosts of an empire. Rebecca Litchfield is one who couldn’t resist the haunting allure of the ruins of the Soviet Union.

Tree trunks and rocks are set up to support a leaning wall of Li Yonghua's damaged cave house in an area where land is sinking next to a coal mine, in Helin village of Xiaoyi, China's Shanxi province, August 2, 2016. (Photo by Jason Lee/Reuters)

A man carries the body of his son for burial after he was killed when a rooftop of his house collapsed due to heavy rain in the outskirts of Peshawar, Pakistan April 27, 2015. A severe storm in northwest Pakistan, dubbed a “mini-cyclone”, has killed 44 people and injured more than 200, officials said, raising their previous death toll. (Photo by Fayaz Aziz/Reuters)

Shemika Charles limbos under her car at Niagara Falls State Park on May 28, 2015 in Buffalo, New York. A world record holding limbo queen thinks she has become the first person to shimmy under a car. Shemika Charles amazed herself and onlookers when she bent over backwards to get underneath the SUV earlier this week. The supple 22-year-old entered the record books in 2010 when she limboed down to an incredible eight and a half inches – the height of a beer bottle. She trains for up to four hours a day to keep her body in peak condition and now travels around America performing with her family. However, regular performances put an incredible strain on her body and she sees a chiropractor once a week to have her hips realigned. Her mother was also a successful limbo dancer in her home country of Trinidad and Tobago but had to give up due to injury. (Photo by Ruaridh Connellan/Barcroft USA)

Emilia Pechinkova, a 24-years-old Bulgarian Pomak (Bulgarian speaking Muslims) bride poses for a photograph following the “gelina” or face painting ceremony carried out by female guests and relatives in preparation for her three-day wedding ceremony in the village of Draginovo, 100 kms southeast of Sofia on April 22, 2016. Bulgaria's Muslim population is one of the highest in the European Union. During the Communist regime religious rituals were not tolerated, and Muslims were forced to abandon wearing their traditional wedding outfits. Recently, more young Pomak women want to include traditional wedding customs that were forbidden during the regime, regardless of their secular lifestyles and the high cost of such a wedding. (Photo by Nikolay Doychinov/AFP Photo)

A Myanmar Shiite Muslim devotee runs barefoot over a bed of burning coals as he takes part in a Muharram procession ahead of the Islamic holiday Ashura, in Yangon, Myanmar, October 22, 2015. Muslims across the world are observing Moharram, the first month of Islamic calender, the climax of Moharram is the Ashura festival commemorating the martyrdom of Imam Hussein, a grandson of the Prophet Mohammed in the Iraqi city of Karbala in the seventh century. (Lynn Bo Bo/EPA)