March 29, 2024
Photo Credit: thisweekinraymond.com
Photo Credit: thisweekinraymond.com

From water yellow enough to be apple juice to unfinished rooms, Sochi is not ready for the Olympics to say the least. Russia knew 7 years ago that they would be hosting the 2014 Winter Olympics. However, the hotels weren’t even finished, water were too toxic to wash your face with, travelers had to wash their face with bottled water, and some rooms didn’t have heat in the room or hot water. The hotels were just adding elevators and walls when the journalists and athletes arrived. The ones who are building and fixing, more than 100 construction workers from either Serbia and Bosnia-Herzegovina claim they were deported or detained to their countries often without being paid for their work. Additionally, the poor stray dogs that have been spotted everywhere even in the hotels were “caught and disposed” by a pest control company.

The Winter Olympics has made the living conditions for the permanent residents of 5A Akatsy street in Russia even more “miserable.” For years they were not provided with neither running water nor swage system, but with the addition of new highways, which has cut them off from the city center. While the new glittering constructions are put in to represent the modern and successful economy of Russia, the villages next to these projects are forced to live with construction wastes and chronic electricity shortage. Alexandra Krivchenko, a resident of the Akatsy street and a 37-year old mother said, ” everyone was looking forward to the Olympics, we just never thought they would leave us in the middle of a federal highway.”  with the hotels still under construction, Journalists and Olympic athletes didn’t have nice things to say about their hotels in Sochi either. Here are some tweets that they posted:

Marc MacKinnon's TWEETRyan Stanzel's TweetDangerous waterSochi Water