Trip 2 - Day 9: Block Party

Any self respecting hockey fan (apparently, I'm not included in this category) knew the importance of Russia & Canada's game last night. Me? I didn't even know there was a hockey game. Go figure. That is, I didn't know until some insane hour when car horns started blaring, people in the street below started shouting, something sounding much too similar to bombs exploding was going on nearby, fireworks were set off which looked like bullet tracers to one very confused and bleary eyed American... Niiiiiiice way to be woken up in a foreign city. Very nice. I thought we were under seige and for a nanosecond thought to myself "Great...and I forgot to register us with the American Embassy on this trip!"
What I thought was the end of the world was actually Russia trying (and succeeding) to win their first world title since 1993, and the defending champions (that would be Canada) trying to win their 4th championship in 6 years. Or so say the articles I googled to find out what in the world rattled me out of bed and caused a few more gray hairs to pop out. I skipped the coffee fix this morning. I had enough of a jolt last night to last me awhile, thank you very much!
I'm the type of person who is up at the first hint of daylight and it's hard for me to take a nap unless it's completely dark. Moscow has my internal clock all messed up because it doesn't get dark here until after 10:30pm, and the sun rises around 5:45 or 6am. So there is actually very little "nightime" for me to sleep in. I'm lucky if I fall asleep here before midnight or 12:30, and then I'm up before 7am. After 21 days of this, I'm just wondering how long it will take me to get back into my normal routine once we're home. Oh, wait a second...I think I can kiss any sense of "normalcy" goodbye now that Ilya's going to be taking over our household! Actually, I can't wait for this to happen.
Last night's little block party did me in, though, and I actually slept till 8:30 this morning, and Norm finally rolled out of bed around 10 or so. It was raining so we decided to chill in the apartment for a bit and see what the weather had in store for us. After we took showers, we noticed the sun starting to peek through so we headed out to the Arbat area again. There is a children's store close to the apartment we're checking into tomorrow, and we wanted to scope it out. We found it, as well as the chicken shack (for lack of a better term) that Susan raved about on her blog. After Norm bought 2 roasted chickens, we headed back to the apartment and have been hanging out ever since. Not much exciting going on around here today. Sorry, folks! Like how I reeled you in to reading this post, though?!
Tomorrow we will see Ilya again, and then check into our new apartment in the afternoon. We'll be staying there through the end of our trip. Our current apartment has been fine, but I'm looking forward to a change in scenery. This is a slide show of what we have called our humble abode for the past 9 days: