A new addition to the family

Meet our new cat and the third member of our family. It's a girl and she's about 4 years old. She hasn't got a name yet, so I'm open to suggestions from the peanut gallery. I was thinking about Mishka, but sometimes I think Monster is more fitting. The precious little thing has a fine habit of howling all night long, so we've taken to putting her in "her" room for the night and shutting the door. In addition to sleeping with earplugs, this has proved quite effective. Of course, she probably still cries, but I don't have to hear it. No one call animal abuse, I've got her in there with a full bowl of food, all bedding, toys and her box.

Petr is very unhelpful with the name conundrum. Every time I make a new suggestion, he shrugs and says that it's up to me what I call her because he already has a name for her. "Drak".  I am not going to call my cat "Drak" because, firstly, drak is Czech for dragon, secondly, it's masculine. And thirdly, Petr calls everything with four legs "Drak" and sometimes me as well! You don't call a little, fluffy, female cat a dragon. Elina offered up the name "Pushinka", which in Russian means something like little cute fuzzy/fluffy and is FEMININE. Ok, I'm considering it. But how to shorten? "Here Push, here kitty kitty." I'm not sure.

We got her last Saturday from a shelter in the south of the city, where they referred to her as "Amber" because of her eye color. Ok, fitting, but I know girls named Amber and I just have some strange aversion to naming pets people names, unless they are really uncommon ones, like Archibald or Percy. She was living in a tiny flat with some twenty other cats. We came there to check them out, which was not an easy feat:
First, we had to get on the metro for twenty odd minutes to get to the second to last station on the purple line. As the metro reaches the outskirts, it increases speed. I think it's safe to say it was going about 80 mph at one point, with the whole carriage shaking.
We then we had to figure out how to buy tickets for the bus and determine where the bus was going. Buying the tickets was fun. There was a small kiosk with a babushka inside. Petr asked very politely for the tickets, saying "good day to you" and all that. She snapped at him to hurry up because she was getting cold with the window open. Sweet. Then it came to finding the bus. Prague people: your buses are awesome. Not only are they less than thirty years old, the bus stops have tables telling you the stops of the bus, and the bus also has an announcement of which stop you're at. In Moscow, the bus tables only tell the times of arrival at that particular station, and the bus number. I guess you must know the name of the end stop to ensure that you are not heading off in the wrong direction. You also must know how many stops you should go in order to get off at the right one (or be lucky enough to be sitting on the side where you can see the small sign at each stop). We didn't know it and it had not shown online when we were checking what bus to take. Luckily, Petr asked a lady and she told us. Good to know you can sometimes depend on people, even Russians, when in a pinch.
When on the bus, at one point some crazy lady yelled at me to stop staring at her. I, in fact, was not looking at her, but out the window. However, seeing as her two eyes were pointing in different directions, I can see how she might have been mistaken. It took me a moment to figure out she was yelling at me, then I looked imploringly at Petr, who told her that I wasn't looking at her, but probably at her dog (a little chihuahua dressed in a powder blue puffer vest with fur edging). Luckily, our stop was next.
Luba is the sweet lady who takes in all these cats and feeds them (and also stray dogs on the street) with her own money from a very small pension. There were so many to look at, it was hard to choose. But I saw this "Amber" with her round little head and her smaller-than-average tail (it's like 3/4s length) and she reminded me a bit of Scooter and home, so I picked her. We were fortunate to get a ride home with a shelter volunteer in her private car (I had been thinking about how horrible the repeat trip home would be on bus and metro with a cat). It was the longest hour-something, OMG. The cat freaked out the ENTIRE time. Kitty no like car. She howled and turned herself over and over in the carrier until she was foaming at the mouth.
When we finally got home, I released her in the bathroom and she scurried behind the washer, remaining there most of the night. The next morning I couldn't find her anywhere. After serious searching, I found her inside the couch. She kept returning there until I filled every crevice with something so she couldn't. Kitty foiled. She just went under the chair instead.

These last couple of days she's been adjusting more and more, sleeping in the open and coming to us for loves and food. She still doesn't play and I don't know if she is that kind of cat. She mostly enjoys looking out the window and sleeping. I keep telling Petr we should get a kitten so that she is not lonely, and she'd have someone to force her to play (kittens do that). I don't think he's buying it. He likes her though, and it's pretty cute to watch him try to get her attention, even with his calls of "Dračku" :-)