Once the excitement of the first few days of the Olympics wore off, Sarah and I were starting to feel like we had gotten into the swing of things. With different events every day, there was no way to get into a real regular schedule, but we had our routines down!
Every evening before going to bed, we looked at the event schedule for the next day and decided what time to wake up. We very quickly realized after the first few days that Sarah was not waking up when her alarm went off (in all fairness, we were working some pretty long days!), so eventually, it was just me setting my alarm and then waking her up in the morning. Neither one of us are morning people, so getting ready in the morning didn't exactly happen quickly! But, eventually we got out the door to breakfast.
Breakfast at our hotel was amazing. They had an incredible spread with everything from an omelette bar to rotating Russian food items to multiple fresh squeezed juices. My typical breakfast consisted of eggs with cheese and tomatoes, fresh squeezed orange juice, coffee and a piece of something I can only describe as chocolate bread. Sometimes, I switched it up with the rotating American-style breakfast item of the day (usually pancakes or waffles) or some muesli.
One morning in particular, I was pretty pumped to see that they had waffles out. However, there was no maple syrup. I asked the woman attending to that area if they had any somewhere that I could have. She very apologetically said they were out for at least a few days. But, as I shrugged and started to thank her anyways, she said, "But we do have sour cream!"
Despite my confusion, I thanked her and returned to my table, where I recounted the story to Sarah. After some quick Googling, we discovered that sour cream is a common pancake/waffle topping in Russia. However, it was not top on my list of things to try since I'm not a big fan of sour cream in the first place!
A few days into our Sochi experience, Sarah and I decided that we needed to hunt down a grocery store. Our schedule was pretty brutal - a typical day started around 9 a.m. with breakfast, followed by a 45-minute bus ride to a venue (the first event of the day was usually around 11 a.m.). Since the venues were that far from our hotel, we typically just stayed up there until the day's events wrapped up (many nights, that wasn't until 1 a.m.) and, after taking our 45-minute bus ride back, were home at the hotel by 2 a.m. Because of that schedule, we found ourselves frequently going without real meals. There were concession stands and media cafeterias, but they were a little lacking and frequently ran out of food before we were able to get there.
So, grocery store it was! We wandered down the street on one of our rare afternoons off and walked into a place whose sign read (in English!) "Food and Alcohol Market." Once inside, we were greeted by a wall of liquor, a refrigerated case of beer and your typical array of checkout line chocolate bars and chip bags. We walked through that area and found grocery items.
Through photos on the packaging, we were able to generally discern what each item was. We found lots of canned meat, caviar-flavored chips, wafer cookies in dozens of flavors and black cherry juice. We ended up leaving with cheese, crackers and wafer cookies. Those wafer cookies would end up tasting like the most glorious food on earth every night when we got home!
We later went back to the alcohol market to purchase some souvenirs...but that's for another blog entry!
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