Zdravstvuyte!

Well it's official: your Bonnie lies over the ocean. Greetings from Russia. Where they keep the cold when other places aren't using it.Actually, the weather's been pretty good so far. What's funny is that it almost seems to be making the locals uneasy. They're so used to things starting to turn ugly right about now that they don't know how to react to summer lasting as long as this.I arrived in St. Petersburg on Friday afternoon with a group of 9 other American students. My host family is just as sweet as can be. I'm living with a mother (Tatiana Nikolaevna), her 2 daughters (Yelena, 21, and Tanya, 17), and their dog Ema. Oooh, boy. Ugliest. Dog. Ever.Not only is the family incredibly nice and congenial, but their apartment is great. It's absolute luxury by Russian standards. I think it's safe to say that I totally lucked out in terms of my housing assignment for this program. Tatiana has even offered to do my laundry!After dinner and a much needed shower (great water pressure, by the way), I went to bed. It was a bit of a fitful night, though, between the jetlag and the early pangs of homesickness. On Saturday, the other students and I were led on a walking tour of the area around the university. Our department's building is right on the Neva River, and the view is amazing. We walked across a gorgeous bridge to the square where the Hermitage is. That's right. The freaking Hermitage is within walking distance of my school. As is the Bronze Horseman. It's such a trip that I'll be spending everyday so close to such iconic Russian landmarks.After the group walking tour, Tanya took me and a couple of other students to the Peter and Paul Fortress. It's a small island that has a prison (where Dostoevsky was held) and a church (where many of the tsars and tsarinas are entombed, including Catherine the Great and, as of recently, the entire Romanov family). We lounged on the island's strip of sandy beach for a while, just conversing and taking in the unseasonably nice St. Petersburg weather.Classes officially start later this week-- we've just been having introductory lectures so far-- but first they're going to test us (exhaustively) to see how our language skills measure up as of now. Wish me luck (I think I need it)!