Greetings from London

Here we are in London, after the first leg of our long journey to Irkutsk! The flight was fairly smooth; some of us slept, but I was busy watching a movie about Roald Dahl. Now we are breakfasting and waiting for our next flight.
Meredith Ruhl

About to depart from Logan

Ten students, three instructors, and a junior assistant all met up successfully at Logan Airport in Boston and somehow made it through the rigors of the security checkpoint. We're now relaxing by our gate, ready to board the British Airways 747 in about half an hour. Nadia and Kirill, two students from Irkutsk who spent the summer doing research with Prof. Moore, are traveling with us all the way, and it's great to have them as part of the group. We'll try to post again tomorrow from London, Moscow, or both.

Important note: This is pretty much a one-way blog

Greetings on the eve of our departure for Baikal! I know lots of family and friends will be following us as we journey to the other side of the world and back. I wanted to let you all know that we will have little to no opportunity to read and respond to your questions and comments while we are in Russia. Our uplink to the Internet via roaming cellphone and satellite phone -- unlike wifi -- is extraordinarily expensive in Russia, and we will connect just long enough to post our daily messages and photos. This means, alas, that the Wellesley-Baikal 2011 blog cannot really function as a two-way forum for discussion with course participants. Nonetheless, I hope you will go ahead and post comments and queries, to which we will gladly reply once we're back in the U.S., or perhaps sooner, if we happen to stumble across a wifi hotspot in the wilds of Siberia along the way. Stranger things have happened! Thanks again for stopping in,
                 Tom Hodge