Hi Everyone,
I’m writing from Sochi!! Well, really I’m in the town of Adler which seems to be much closer and better connected to virtually every transit option than Sochi but if I said Adler, no one would know what I was talking about. Anyway… OLYMPICS!!
I landed in Sochi airport (Adler airport) at a little after 4 am this morning. It was a hour and forty five minute flight from Istanbul which is two hours off from what I will now call Olympic Time which is nine hours ahead of EST. I was prepared and dreading having to spend an entire other day awake but I was pleasantly surprised. When I landed, I trickled through customs. The only heightened security I saw was a surprisingly thorough attempt to rattle me by feigning an issue with the passport scanner for about three minutes to see if I would start exhibiting signs of nervousness. I think it would have worked if I had anything to hide or if I didn’t speak the universal language of hardware problems.
Next I spoke to a very nice woman at the information desk who arranged for a taxi while her colleague slept slumped at the desk. I ran upstairs, withdrew some rubles from an ATM, and then I was off in a cab. I was a little nervous about getting into the cab at 5 a.m. because if there was no one to let me into my hotel, I was going to be stuck outside in the rain in the middle of the night.
My cab driver didn’t speak any English but his GPS doubled as a speech translation machine. And it actually worked really well! The future is here. He translated something and I said back “I’m impressed with the machine.” After reading the translation, he spoke Russian back at it and up popped the English text “that is because it is Russia[n]!” I LOL’d. He topped off the virtuoso performance by getting out of the cab and ringing the hotel doorbell and making sure there was someone to let me in.
There was! In fact, there were two women who blearily checked me in while I apologized repeatedly for waking them up. As I expected, my room was occupied by people leaving today. Unexpectedly, they offered to let me have another room for the morning. Even less expectedly, they said I could keep that room if I wanted it — it was not so nice but only 3/4 of the price of the room I had reserved. Give me the cheapest room you’ve got, I said.
The room is small and the two twin beds must have been premies because they’re tiny. The mini-fridge is unplugged and somewhat discombobulated, there was a slight water running sound in the bathroom, and one of the overhead compact flourescents had a little trouble turning off. Compared to the fear-mongering newspaper stories, that’s five star! It’s really quite fine and I’m happy with it and the price reduction. Oh — there’s also wifi and if the former Soviet Union had just specialized in water pressure, they’d still be around.
I got situated and trailed off to sleep as the sun rose to the beautiful accompaniment of — are those ROOSTERS? Damn.
To be continued…