Monday, February 10, 2014

May the odds be ever in your favor...

Sochi Hunger Olympic Games

I suppose I should use hash tags and be live tweeting all of this to add to the wave of 'Sochiproblems' but alas, my rejection of such new social conventions runs deep. Or I don't have reliable Internet; the former sounds better. Oooo look, fancy punctuation! I should also preface this brilliant observation piece by mentioning I am writing this on my iPad, which I am only slightly competent using.

This marks my 3rd trip to Russia, and it has consisted of one Situatsiya after another. Your plane is delayed and you may miss your connection: figure it out. You need to get a taxi from the airport to your hotel but they charge Americans 3x more: don't give in to the robber-barons and make sure your mother can keep her mouth shut. You are lost: get directions to the train station. Russians are lost: give them wrong directions to the train station. You are at a restaurant: order for your highly demanding mother. A stranger wants to use you in their documentary about sochi: get them to buy you a hat in exchange. Except for the last, it's as if my language training was preparing me for this moment. Oh wait....very clever! 

And now a brief summary of day 1 in ye olde Rasha (Sochi-style)!

Saturday consisted almost solely of wandering around the Olympic village trying to not get shot by the po-po for accidentally trespassing. For all the thousands of volunteers that are here, only a handful speak English (not as much an issue), and even fewer know where to go (very much an issue). I like to save the phrase "useless dunderheads" for special occasions and I think the Olympic volunteers deserve such high praise. They directed us in approximately 3 incorrect ways -- a feat in directional inaccuracy-- and we walked for 2 hours trying to get to the Olympic park. We are staying on a cruise ship that is docked directly behind the Olympic village. Try as I might, I have yet to see a naked Olympian. But today is only day 3. There is still time. Geographically, it is perhaps a 20 minute walk from the Olympic park, but thanks to nutso security and even nutso-er design, we are 30 minutes from the train station that we then must take to the entrance. The entire journey door-to-door is approximately 10 billion hours. After finally stumbling into a train, we started our hour-long train journey up to the mountains for our first fascinating event--luge. 

Sochi's rather silly slogan  is fairly accurate: it was a frigid 16c at the coast (ergo hot), but once we got up to the mountains it was a cozy 6 (perhaps cool). Then the sun went down, my feet got wet, and I melted into a cold whiny baby. But that is for later. The only categorically false part of the slogan is "Yours". If by "yours" 
they mean "for you, you prepubescent volunteers that swarm the park like angry little termites" then the slogan is spot on. If they mean the Olympics are for the general peon populace, then no. Prices are astronomical (a malady I attribute to the Olympics in general, not Sochi) and there are useless bundles of flesh everywhere. Blah blah blah general complaints. I had low expectations coming in, knowing about Russian infrastructure and the general malaises of Sochi 2014 so far. And I have been more or less satisfied with my expectations. Nothing more, nothing less.

But back to the mountains. The mountain cluster is up in Krasnaya Polyana which is actually quite lovely. You can see snow (woohoo!) and it is built like a quaint ski town. We took a gondola up to the Sanki sliding center to spectate luge. Because our tickets are practically steerage for standing for 2.5 hours watching people zip by, we spent most of our time in a small tent with the other poor people waiting for our cold-induced doom. The sun had set and temperatures were dropping. Our standing section was, kindly enough, the only part of the entire stadium that had snow, so as 6:30 rolled around, we took our stoic places on our mountain of wet snow and soggy cold mud-ground. Mary and I lasted for a total of 40% of the event before starting the trudge back. The Americans did generally poorly, and 
there's only so much interest I can take in the 2 second flight of a man on a small sled before icicles start forming on my toenails. It was also runs 1 and 2 of a 4-run event, so no one would win a medal that night. We started our 2 hour  journey of 
bus-train-footshuffle back to our ship where dinner was just starting to be served at 10:30. The Portuguese (the owners of our cruise liner)  know how to do meal times right. We then snuggled into our cabin to watch the interesting events (read "anything with ice skates") on tv like the rest of the sane and intelligent world.

No comments:

Post a Comment