The forgotten Olympic city: The Sochi Games aren't actually in Sochi
ADLER, Russia — After the opulent sporting venues, hundreds of box hotels, the freshly built amusement park, the new roads and train lines, the colorful, if questionable, brick boardwalk along the Black Sea, and the waterfront "McMansions" (strangely unoccupied) — after all of that — the first thing you notice in Adler are the fences.
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They are a metallic construct with a stonewall design on the bottom and five wide, brown, faux-wood slats rising up to about eight feet. They line roads, run along back alleys and sometimes fence in other fences.
Government contractors threw them up all over the place, locals say, to keep tourist eyes from seeing what's behind them: construction sites, swamp, poverty — in other words, Adler.
These are officially the Sochi Olympics, but the games are not being played in Sochi. They are happening in unheralded Adler, technically a microdistrict (in Russian city planning parlance) of Sochi, its larger neighbor up the coast.
http://sports.yahoo.com/news/russia-s-forgotten-city-of-the-sochi-games-192622719.html
