Talk:Preparations underway for start of 2014 Winter Paralympics

Journalist notes
The photos uploaded to Commons were taken on the train between Moscow and the Sochi region. None of the signs like that appeared until after we hit the Sochi region.

I spent about 45 minutes to an hour walking around the Coastal Village Olympic Park looking for the stupid Main Press Centre. It was not easily found. The signage was awful. Seriously awful. When it was done being awful, the volunteers, police and security inside the Olympic Park were not able to answer the question of where the Main Press Center was. I found out after talking to some one in catering. In London, when I asked where things were, people knew. If the volunteers did not know, the volunteers got on their walkie talkies and asked. No one here could be bothered to ask. "No English" and that was the extent of it. At least four times, they just told me to keep going in what turned out to be the completely wrong direction.

I went to get my media accreditation. This was BEFORE wandering around the Olympic Park in Adler (the coastal village). In London, there were signs. There were people to guide you at the train station. There was a special line in Moscow for accredited people to get through customs, but there was no one there outside that. And while there was a free ticket for the train for accredited people, it took a ot of effort to find these things. The signage was poor. The volunteers were not approaching people. They were sitting back. The accreditation took place in Heathrow. Blah. I searched for media accreditaiton line, but there was no signage. I finally stumbled upon regular accreditation and got it there. (Some one asked to take my picture with me because it was so cool that I was from Wikipedia.) The line was pretty long, with a lot of contractors and paid employees there. There was a wait. No one was really good at answering questions by accreditation either. It was a mess. (When I got to the Main Press Center, I asked where the place to get the confirmation was, so I could show the Ukrainians where it was. It was someplace unsigned and completely elsewhere from where I got mine.)

Inside the Olympic park, the place was pretty dead. There were not that many people. Most of them were either volunteers or OCOG accredited. I did not see a single Paralympian wandering the place, or any other media besides one EP accredited photographer. The food places were starting to set up, but that was it. Lots of places were fenced off. I had to go through security to get into the Olympic park, but it was not much more stringent than the security in London. (On some level, it felt more lax.)

The weather was nice, probably about 20C as I was wearing just a t-shirt and jeans. It was nice, though it got cloudier later. It was sunny in the early afternoon.--LauraHale (talk) 15:29, 6 March 2014 (UTC)


 * On unrelated news, my hotel is nice. The toilet works.  The door works.  Everything works.  No complaints here at this media hotel unlike the people at the Olympic Games.  Everything works.  The only problem is the water sucks. --LauraHale (talk) 15:32, 6 March 2014 (UTC)