Last week I took what one of my friends called a "Hanseatic tour"--to Helsinki, Finland and Tallinn, Estonia. The excuse was to take part in an amazing conference on post-socialist memory--and I was indulging in my own post-socialist memories, since the last time I went to Estonia it was Soviet, in the year 1989. I wanted to see what post-Soviet Tallinn was like and to hear in person what Russian-speakers, Ukrainian refugees, and local Estonian-speakers feel about the place in these difficult times. That part of the world feels like home to me--the quality of light, the air, the occasional mist or even sudden downpour. Being so close and yet so far from the cities of St. Petersburg and Vyborg, where I spent happy days and have so many friends and dear colleagues, was a sentimental journey for sure. Back in that same 1989 my father came to the Soviet Union, traveling on his first-ever passport, to visit me during my year studying in Moscow at the Pushkin Institute for Langua
A blog about travel and staying put, reading and writing, food and food for thought.