Happy New Year! Dina and I did end up making it until midnight, however I think we were asleep the moment the fireworks stopped outside! We had our meeting in the morning to review the games from Saturday then we were free until the games started this afternoon. I had the first game in Zlin - Czech Republic vs Russia. I had a ton of fun working with the two Finns, Anu and Anna. It was a great game, both teams were very evenly matched and played a tough, physical game. The arena was packed and extremely loud - the Czech fans were beating drums and had horns going the entire game. The game was 0-0 going into the 3rd period but the Czech scored a beautiful goal early in the period. As you can imagine, the crowd went absolutely nuts. It was so loud at one point none of the players heard our whistle when the puck hit the bench. With a little less than 5 minutes left we had a major penalty for kneeing on the Czech team. This meant they had to play the rest of the game shorthanded. However, they were able to put in a shorthanded goal with about 2:30 left to make the game 2-0. Russia never pulled their goalie and really never had any quality scoring opportunities on the power play. After the game, as per IIHF tradition, they played the winning team's national anthem. It was cool to hear the Czech girls sing in front of their home crowd. After my game I quick walked back to the hotel to put on warm clothes since I was the standby official for the next game, USA vs Sweden. Luckily nobody went down so I was able to just watch the entire game. The US controlled the game and won 7-0.
After the game we came back to the hotel and had dinner as a group. The food here has been pretty good overall. We get a "menu" each day for the following day where we have several choices for both lunch and dinner. It is nice to have a choice - when I was in France we didn't have any choices. Every meal starts off with soup or a salad. The soups have been awesome, but the salads are served without dressing which is kind of strange. I've had various types of chicken and pork and everything has been decent.
Tomorrow is our first day off. We have breakfast in the morning then we are going on a tour of the city of Zlin. I'm not exactly sure what there is to see here but we'll soon find out! They are also taking us bowling tomorrow night, which I'm sure will be entertaining. I'm keeping my fingers crossed that the Winter Classic is on tv here tomorrow night (it starts at 9:00). Since all the Czech are huge Flyers fans because of Jagr, I think there is a chance it might be, and even though I won't understand the commentators!
Off to bed, goodnight all!
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