Alive(ish)

I am back to the Motherland. Finally. I thought I would write a quick post just to say I am alive after my travels. I am happy to be back in Petersburg, visa in hand. It would be an understatement to say that I am worn out. I didn't sleep for nearly 65 hours--trying to catch a plane from Istanbul to Helsinki to do my visa (4.5 hours of line waiting outside the consulate) and then finding a train to Petersburg, since I had nowhere to stay in Finland (sitting in the airport another night was not on my list of things to do). So at the moment I am settling back in, trying to sleep, getting things set up for research, and trying to gain some weight back. Even if my host mom's scale is more than 5 lbs off, which she claims it isn't, I have nontheless dropped under 100 lbs, which with my 5 ft 5.5 inch frame is a little crazy. Alla was horrified and is already stuffing me with bliniy and cakes. Haha.
In any case, in the next week or so I will try to fill you in on things. I have thousands of pictures that I will probably never really get around to uploading, but I will try to put some of the highlights on flickr when I can