"Of course he had lady friends... he had a moustache!"

So, unfortunately, my first weekend in St. Petersburg turned out to be quite boring.  Hopefully it gets better from here.
T.T. was at her dacha (a sort of rustic summer house that most city dwellers in Russia own and frequently visit during the summer) for most of the weekend.  I'm not sure whether this was because it was a national holiday on Saturday (Russia Day, which is actually a relatively new holiday and not very widely celebrated, considering) or whether merely because it was a weekend.  In any case, Latalia and I had the apartment to ourselves for the greater part of the weekend.  We woke up around 9 and made ourselves breakfast, then passed the time studying until 11:30, at which time we went to meet the rest of our group and Stas, our professor, in the city center for a group outing.  We used the metro for the first time and found out that it wasn't so scary after all (although Latalia did have trouble figuring out where to put her token in the turnstile...).  It also wasn't as crowded as I anticipated, but perhaps that is because of the timing - it seems to me that the city doesn't really wake up on the weekends until noontime (I don't know whether that's a St. Petersburg thing, or a Russian cultural thing, or a summer thing, or a city thing in general).
We met the rest of our group on Nevsky Prospect and wandered a bit before going to the Cafe Zinger on the second floor of Dom Knigi (literally house of books), the largest bookstore in St. Petersburg which is located in the old Singer Sewing Machine Company building.  The cafe was quite pricey so I only got a vanilla cream danish with fruit on it that was quite delicious.  Some of the other members of my group ordered hot chocolate, which turned out to literally be chocolate that had been warmed to a drinkable consistency.  I tried some, but it would have been too rich for me to have drunk an entire cup of it :P
Well, I thought the weather in Maine was crazy, but it turns out to be nothing compared to St. Petersburg.  The day was a little gray and menacing when we left the house, but we still weren't prepared for the deluge that suddenly hit us when we were out wandering near the Bronze Horseman.  We took shelter in a nearby Teremok, but not before getting completely soaked (fortunately, most of us had umbrellas with us.  I will personally make sure I don't leave the apartment without one from now on).  Teremok is the Russian idea of a fast-food restaurant, and they sell mostly блины (a kind of greasy pancake that can be filled with all sorts of things, from meat to potatoes to sour cream to fruit) which run from $1 to $3 in price.  I've found that most of the food in Russia is cheaper than in America, presumably because the raw materials are cheaper.
Finally we gained a brief respite from the downpour, which we promptly took advantage of to climb to the collonade of St. Isaac's cathedral, from which height we could survey the entire city.  I took some pretty amazing pictures from there - it was SO windy!!  Then we headed home, exhausted.  Since Saturday was my dad's birthday, I tried to call home (and got through with no problems), but international calling from my Russian cell phone is extremely expensive - it costs about 70x more to call America than to call another cell phone in my network.  Thus, I only dared to say "Hey, it's Erin, call me back please" before hanging up.  Unfortunately, Mom wasn't able to figure out how to do that from the Tracfone (from which it doesn't cost any more than calling me in Princeton) so I waited for the call in vain.  I occupied myself for the rest of the evening studying; not the most entertaining pastime, but extremely necessary with the amount of vocabulary we are expected to absorb per week.  It's a bit overwhelming at times, but the marked improvement I can already notice in my speaking ability is encouraging.

On Sunday I went to Calvary Chapel St. Pete again, this time with Phil (another member of the group who attends PFA).  Though he arrived late to our designated meeting place, by the time we arrived at the church at 11:10 the 11am service had yet to start.  Oh, Calvary Chapel.  It's good to know some things don't change ;]  This week we sang the Victory Chant in Russian - I loved it.  (It sounds very military and yet quite beautiful in Russian :])  After the service I bought the church's worship album and I can't wait to listen to it (hopefully on T.T.'s CD player) because it definitely has some songs on it that I know from back home.  Phil and I also tried introducing ourselves to some of the church members our own age, but soon realized that our limited vocabulary meant that we didn't have very much to talk about.  Or perhaps next time we should find a more talkative interlocutor :P
The weather on Sunday wasn't much better than Saturday - very unpredictable with periods of downpour interspersed with bright sunshine.  Apparently this is normal for St. Petersburg in June, but July and August can get quite hot.  Right now it tends to be cool in our apartment (enough so that I need my fleece or a blanket to be comfortable while studying) but I will probably like it less when it is 90 or 95 degrees outside and hot and stuffy indoors.  So I'll take it now.
On Sunday we had something new for supper for one of the first times.  It was macaroni (which only differed in the shape of the pasta) and котлеты (think ground mystery meat).  It tasted much better than it sounds.
I ended up spending most of Sunday studying - between breakfast and church, all afternoon after church (I came home almost immediately after the service because of the poor weather) and again after supper until bedtime.  When T.T. found out that that was all Latalia and I had done all day, she commented on how boring it must be.  It is, when I think about it, but I seem to have slipped back into Princeton mode where all I can think about is studying.  Maybe if the weather improves I'll be more tempted to explore and actually take advantage of this wonderful city, but only time can tell.  Hopefully I won't have too much homework each day to be able to do that.

I have a new favorite Russian word now: снегоход.  It means snowplow, and the great thing about it is that (just like in English) it is a compound word.  снег means snow, and the verb ходить means to go back and forth (to make many round trips).  Thus, a снегоход is something that makes many round trips in the snow.  I love it when language makes sense (which doesn't happen very often, and especially not in English :P).

On an unrelated note, this time I really will stop blogging every day.  Most of what I'm doing every day here actually isn't very exciting, and if I tried to write about it I would bore myself and you.  From now on, unless we do something special, I'll probably only blog 2-3 times per week, and they (hopefully) won't be as long as my previous posts.  Most of you are probably glad for this, although for my few devoted followers whom I know savor every word (Justin, Luke) I feel a small pang of regret.  However, in the general interest of not becoming completely boring and mundane, I will desist from (for instance) describing my dinner each night.  And now in all of the time in which I could be sitting in front of this computer blogging about all of my trivials, I can be out having more adventures actually worth blogging about.  It's a win-win situation.  :]