My dear friend Tanya sent this to me today: Dear brothers and sisters, From all our hearts we send you our greetings on the coming holiday of Christ’s resurrection! May all the sorrows and troubles retreat before the radiance of Easter which opens the doors of heavens to us. Orthodox Easter is on the 19-th of April, but we are sending you beforehand our traditional Easter cake “kulich” and painted eggs which are in every home on this day.   With love, Samara CrossRoads team (The card says:  on the day of Holy Easter) Do you notice the red eggs? … 

Drum roll please… Today at 2:20 p.m. the Fed Ex truck arrived with my passport affixed with the lovely Russian visa stamp you can see below. Note the interesting spelling of my name. Yes, that really does say Jeanette Morris. What a relief! Nice to have it so much in advance of my departure. I still remember the scene I made the year Becky went with me. The visas arrived in the midst of her graduation festivities, just a day before we were flying out. I burst into tears when the truck drove up and nearly hugged the driver when… 

A great response so far to the invitation to subscribe. It’s exciting to me to see the list growing each day. Welcome all of you!  We’ve made a few additions to my itinerary. Soon each day will have both “a.m.” and “p.m.” slots as invitations and events present themselves. I always try to attend a performance of some sort–ballet, opera, philharmonic–as well as find the time to stroll the shops downtown, look for fun stuff to eat at the daily farmers markets, and hit the fabulous malls (i.e. “Mega-City”) or big-box stores (i.e. “Metro”) that are springing up in the…