Service Will Resume Shortly

I apologize for the 3-week break in newsfeed (or snoozefeed, whichever applies). Just got back from an exciting, exhausting and long overdue visit to Mama Russia. For anyone following international news, the stoppage in the bloggage was in no way connected to riots in the streets of Tallinn (which there were, 2 days after our departure) and fallout thereafter, nor to any cutting of diplomatic or other ties between Estonia and Russia (not that these would affect us personally, though we wondered whether we might need to choose an alternate route back into Estonia), nor to attempts, by "pro-Kremlin" youth groups, to block the highway at the Russia-Estonia border (the youths were hauled away long before we made our way back over the bridge from Ivangorod (RUS) to Narva (EST)).

Being in Russia during this political flare-up with Estonia definitely provided a fascinating backdrop to our journey into Russia, not to mention our stay in Estonia more broadly. (More later about the Bronze Soldier monument and its removal from a square in central Tallinn just prior to Russian Victory Day celebrations.) For me, though, this is really a travel story of places and routines visited and revisited, others bypassed, of a language reclaimed (Y-PA!), of sharing one's past, of remarking ways in which places and people change and noticing how places and people remain remarkably the same, of disconnecting, misconnecting and reconnecting.

As the sign says, PEMOHT! You can spell it out without a Cyrillic keyboard, which is cool. Said aloud, it's actually re-mont, a most useful and frequently-encountered Russian word, which basically means [closed for] repairs; renovation; refurbishment. And so, christlezine, repair, renew and refurb! Due to the scheduling upset, some upcoming posts will, of necessity, be on a 3-or-so-week delay.