Larry here:

Back from a week in the Baltic states. We made it to two out of three, Estonia and Latvia. Lithuania will have to wait. It was a family vacation, meaning we saw every swing and slide in the two countries. Latvia wins for variety of swingsets, and Estonia wins for best swingset close to our hotel. In Estonia, continuing the family theme, we stayed at a hotel attached to a waterpark.
We made it to one cafe/restaurant in Riga, Osiris, that we'd seen in the New York Times' 36 Hours in Riga. But due to a parental discretion advisory, decided to skip the restaurant there called Hospitalis, where pink-haired nurses serve patients at hospital tables.
How lucky am I to be able to muse about such everyday matters. We took a train back to Moscow through country that must have been familiar to my Sokoloff grandparents, close to the Belarussian and Polish shtetls of their early 20th century childhoods. My grandparents got out just in time, and many other relatives perished in the World War II Holocaust in this region. It looked so peaceful on a warm spring night, with aging wood barns and cabins still dotting the landscape. But it was a place my grandparents rarely were nostalgic about. My grandmother recalled hiding in the woods during World War I, and my grandfather remembered the hardships that led him to leave for America. Two generations later I am back, thinking of them and the choices they made.