My daily morning view while waiting for the shuttle bus to the Gorki Media Center in front of our apartment building (at left) in the Rosa Khutor village of Russia.

When I first got settled on the ground here in Rosa Khutor (the area I’m actually living in, which is in the “mountain cluster” about an hour north of Sochi proper), I got a lot of texts and Facebook messages asking me about our living conditions. At the time, the American media was making a big to-do about the poor shape of the hotels many were arriving at. True enough, I had colleagues in Sochi who had to deal with brown running water, nights without electricity, on down to simple things like no shower curtains.

Our situation in Rosa Khutor, however, could be best described as a 180