[Drake]

It just keeps getting better and better...

Almost every room is missing something: lightbulbs, TVs, lamps, chairs, curtains, wifi, heat, hot water. Shower curtains are a valuable piece of the future black market here. (One American photographer was simply told, “You will not get a shower curtain.”)

Hotel reservations are lost, then found, if you’re lucky. German photographer Joerg Reuter arrived in the mountains and found the first room offered to him to be full of construction debris, with yellow-brown water and appliances that didn’t work.

The next room had construction workers still sleeping in it. The third room had a stray dog in it. Reuter was quoted by the Associated Press as saying, “When I came out of the elevator, there was the dog. I said, ‘Right, that’s it.’”

(They are reportedly now killing the numerous stray dogs here, which makes every adorable mutt you see the hero of a Disney movie, directed by Quentin Tarantino. At a press conference Tuesday, Sochi 2014 spokeswoman Alexandra Kosterina said “There is a special service that catches the stray dogs and this, as far as I know, they have a special shelter for the stray dogs, and make a medical examination of them. Like pest control.” It was not comforting.)

But the hotels are where the Russian Games are visibly straining at the seams. In the Ekaterininsky Kvartal hotel, the elevator is broken and the stairway is unlit, with stairs of varying and unpredictable heights.

Outside the Chistya Prudy, there is a bag of concrete in a palm tree, leaking grey down the trunk. Inside, some of the electrical outlets are just plates screwed into drywall.

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Sports Illustrated’s Brian Cazeneuve had to clamber through a window to get out of his hotel on Tuesday morning, since the doors were all unexpectedly locked. Chris Stevenson of Sun Media was without electricity for the first day.

My Postmedia colleague Cam Cole’s bathtub came loose from the wall, and therefore rocks like a ship. He has a shower curtain, though. In the Rosa Khutor section of the mountains, Stacy St. Clair of the Chicago Tribune was told by the front desk that if the water worked, “do not use on your face because it contains something very dangerous.” When it did come out of the tap, it looked like a lot like cloudy urine.

Oh, and one journalist in the Omega hotel complex had to refuse a colleague’s request to stay a night in the second twin bed because … well, there’s no easy way to say this, but when the first journalist arrived, someone had left an indeterminate amount of semen on the sheets of the second bed, and those sheets had been taken away for cleaning, and hadn’t come back.

We’re not even getting into the sidewalks that dive, or the open manholes because the covers are being stolen, or the piles of construction waste all over the city, or the tumbled earth where grass was supposed to be. The whole thing was built on a swamp, and when it rains, there will be mud. But it’s a bit of a mess, either way.

http://www.canada.com/olympics/sochi...rk-in-progress