Ok, so i've lapsed..again...it's monday night and i'm just writing about saturday. Saturday started about two hours after friday ended, when Carrie and Shelly crawled over me to get to the door. They decided that they needed to go home as soon as the metro opened....(at 6 am) I, on the other hand decided to sleep as long as I could. I finally got up at about 9:40 and Nancy suggested that we have breakfast at the American Bar and Grill....Now, mind you, I was supposed to call my friend Nadia between 10 and 11 because I was supposed to spend the day at her family's dacha...Well, I called four times and got an answering machine every time. It's really too bad.. I've been here for about 5 weeks and I have yet to see her. At least breakfast was good. I had a western omlette and coffee..for seven dollars. that's not too bad for this town, these days. The coffee was bottomless...and it was real...not this instant shit that russians are so into. The omlette (obviously) couldn't compare to O'Rourkes, but it was quite tasty. (So, of the Middletown contingent, who's up for O'Rourkes the first Sunday I'm back in town?) It was such a beautiful day that we decided to walk the several miles from Pushkin metro to Kievsky Market. On the way, we stopped in several stores looking for brown sugar, as i'd gotten it into my head that I wanted to bake chocolate chip cookies. Unfortunately, russians have never heard of "brown sugar"...it's just a foreign concept to them. As we passed through red square, we noticed a large circus tent....yep the "World Festival of Circus Arts" was in town. So, we bought tickets for sunday and made plans to meet after dinner, try out this sushi place I'd heard of and go to the circus...but that's another day's story. When we finally got to kievsky market, we wer kinda hungry, so we started to accept the samples of various salads that numerous korean women told us that we "needed to try" Most of them were pretty good and we actually bought a bag of carrot salad to munch on. After sampling one salad, I made the mistake of asking what it was..."Calamari"...i'd just eaten squid that was being sold on the street....but, it's three days later and i'm still alive. At the market, I got a jar of fresh honey and a small sickly aloe plant that was desparate to be transplanted..the jar of honey cost about 6 bucks and the aloe plant cost about 30 cents. After that, (it was about 5 pm) it was onto the metro and home to vegetate...Somehow, I don't think I got to bed too early....but i didn't do anything really interesting.