The new Barys arena

Oh, new hockey arena!  I want so badly to love you unconditionally. Let's face it, compared to the ghetto dump of the old arena, your building is hands down an improvement. Sufficient lighting, cleanliness ... even separate waste receptacles for recycling and garbage. The arena is lovely, the seating offers much better views of the ice and the action than the old arena. Nice touch that the goals light up when a puck goes in, it helps avoid confusion. The food services seemed to be the same not-great food but in larger, cleaner facilities. I can't really complain, though, as two hot dogs, two juice boxes, a Snickers bar, tea, water, and a soda cost about $7-8. Serving the tea in insulated paper cups is certainly an improvement from the plastic Dixie cups that melted and spilled from the boiling water. I'm not in love with the three men's restrooms for every one women's but in truth the line was one of the shortest at a sporting event anywhere so maybe they did do their research on that one. The bouncy castle is another nice touch, and we sent the kids in when the game was over while we waited for the crowd to die down so we could get our car and go home.

And that's the thing. When you build a brand new building from scratch in the middle of the steppe, relatively far from most other things and with acres of empty land all around ... how the hell do you not build a parking lot? In case you didn't notice, there is no metro, tram, El, or other train-type public transit in this city, and the buses aren't exactly the most numerous or convenient. How do you expect people to get to the games?  Shunting us off to the parking lot of the football (soccer) arena across the four lane divided road, which itself has insufficient parking, is not a welcoming experience and may play some small role in the number of empty seats. Not to mention the absurd volume of traffic trying to get to the game - given the distance and the time it took to get there, we could have just as easily walked.

Go Baris!

This is what we were doing last night

This is what Alex was doing last night.  

Play Ball!

Back in the fall, Terry's dad brought us a T-ball stand and bat he found somewhere. Zoltan took to it and it turns out there's 4-6 year old T-ball in the spring. Their first practice was rained out and he finally got to try it out last Friday. He loved it!

Here's a pic of the family playing in the back yard.

CKA Hockey - Playoffs

[Editor's note: this event took place 2, maybe 3 years ago. I edited the post to add labels. Somehow it re-posted as of today. Love technology]

Wow do they take their hockey seriously. We went to a playoff game on Defender's Day (aka Men's Day) and it was a great game. Spartak scored a tying goal with 3 seconds left on the clock, and CKA won in overtime. And we still got home in time for the sitter :)

Some interesting points.
1. The Moscow fans get their own section and it is blanketed with Policia (formerly militsa, in any case the riot police) The photo is from my phone so it isn't so good but there is literally a police officer sitting on either side of the aisle on every single row. Terry tells me they do this for every game, even when the other side only had 6 fans at the game. Wowsers.

2. There is a special CKA fan section, you need to be on some special list to even sit there. These folks are hard core, they have their special chants and arm movements, and the flags. Oh, the flags. I took some video of them cheering for something great the CKA did, I don't remember what. Enjoy.

Goals, goals and more goals

On Sunday I went to see SKA host Spartak.  For those who don't know or forgotten from my previous post.  SKA is the local KHL hockey team in St Petersburg.  Spartak is one of the Moscow KHL teams.  This year SKA has been doing very well as of late.  The two previous games I have seen they won but they were close entertaining games.

This game started out similarly.   Spartak scored first in the first period then SKA answered with there own goal later in the period. The first period ended 1-1 so far continuing on the trend I seen up until this point.  The second period SKA came out flying early on and went up 3-1 and then started to play defense hockey for the last 5 minutes of the period.  Lots of short shifts and dumping the puck in the offense zone.  I figure they wold play a defense third period to try and hold on for the win.

Apparently the players in coach had another idea.  They came out aggressive and attacked the offensive zone.  In the end SKA added another 7 goals in the period.  They were 3 for 3 on the power play.  The only blemish in the period is they gave up one power play goal to Spartak.  The final score was 10-2 it was by far the most lopsided game I have ever seen.