Sochi by Two Blog #10: A Day Without Being Frisked is Like a Day Without..
by Adelaide Ponte Usdin and Wendy Ponte
February 14, 2014
We want to start off today by saying Happy Valentines Day to everyone! Today we saw no live skating but we did watch it in a very cool place!
It was nice to wake up late today and start the day off with coffee and pastries. While Adelaide was doing her homework, Wendy headed over to the very nice Radisson Blu Hotel, which is only a couple of blocks away from where we are currently staying. We are supposed to spend our last 2 nights in Sochi at the same hotel we started out in, and we hoped to find something both closer and nicer than either that place, or the place we are in now..
While waiting at the front desk Wendy saw Scott Hamilton pass by. She decided it was a sign, and sure enough, the hotel had just had some cancellations and were able to give her the reservation. It’s the best Valentine’s Day gift ever! While there, she made a spa reservation for later in the day.
We decided to spend the afternoon on the boardwalk in Adler. Of course this sounds easy to say, but trying to get there or anywhere, seems to invariably be another thing altogether. It is a short walk to the train from our hotel. However, once we got there, we unfortunately seem to have coordinated our travel plans with an elementary school group.
What we may not have mentioned is that here in Sochi everyone gets frisked, every day. In order to get into the Olympic Park, you must be frisked. To take the train, you are frisked. It isn’t just if you look suspicious–everyone gets frisked, every time.
And that includes school children. School children have to be frisked by a woman. Women have to be frisked by a woman. Therefore in a long line of people which includes school children, it is most advantageous to be a man–which unfortunately we are not. Therefore, getting on the train took forever.
Then, although our hotel had told us “Oh, it’s a very short walk from the Adler train station to the boardwalk,” it turned out that you actually have to take a bus to get to the boardwalk from the train station. What we thought might take us an hour, at most, to get a relatively short distance, actually took about two.
Once we got there, it was quite lovely. We had a late lunch at a nice restaurant right on the Black Sea. It was stressful, though, because we had an appointment to get to at the Radisson spa and we were worried about getting there on time.
We asked the restaurant to call us a cab. As usual that took a few phone calls, but one was found for us.
We got to the Radisson for our spa appointment and found ourselves in heaven. Who knew that it was so close to the bare bones dorm rooms we’ve been staying in? There were steam rooms, aromatherapy rooms, saunas and a wonderful indoor pool that is the temperature of a nice, warm bath. Nancy Kerrigan came in to use the fitness center and Adelaide was enthralled!
On our way out of the spa, we passed by Al Roker, which is when we realized that this is NBC’s home while here in Sochi. We went into the hotel’s bar to watch the Men’s Long and have a light dinner. After a moment we realized that the commentators were speaking English, and that is was, in fact, Johnny Weir and Tara Lipinski who were speaking. Because this hotel is where NBC staff are staying, the feed on the monitor’s was directly from NBC.
We found ourselves sitting with staff from the Today show, including Natalie Morales-Rhodes and some of the producers. As the various skaters came on, they began to ask us questions about the skating as they realized that we knew the details of what we were looking at, and we tried to fill them in. Natalie was curious about who we thought were the top ice dancers right now. It was kind of fun! In the end they thanked us for our “commentating.”
Tomorrow we are going to go up the mountain to see some skiing. It will be a nice break from the Sochi area, and from skating. The ice dance events are only a day away, and we can’t wait!