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