Psst…Putin, over here.
Heard the media are complaining about the horrid hotels you’ve built for them in Sochi. Seems like you have an issue with some of them not being finished.
Don’t worry, I have a solution for you. Just give those angry media folks three weeks of double Marriott points. They’d stay in a racoon hole for that.
******
OK, it looks like ol’ Vladamir and Mother Russia are off to a bad start with the media. He invited the world to his country only to house many of them in housing just short of a gulag.
Maybe it was part of the plan, writes Dan Wetzel in Yahoo! Sports.
Right now everyone is laughing at Russia. From the photos going viral around the world to the snickering about an overambitious construction project falling short to the likelihood that posing in double toilet stalls will become the Sochi version of planking or Tebowing.
The only bright side for Putin is no one is talking about gay rights anymore. Or terrorism. Yet.
Of the accomodations, Wetzel writes:
To start, the word hotel means something different here apparently.
On the list of say, hot water, a door capable of closing, a television, light bulbs, clean sheets, a properly hooked up toilet and one pillow per bed, any guest should make like the NBA Finals: take four of seven and gladly move on. And bring light bulbs, they are so valuable on the black market you can trade one for a date with a Russian tennis player.
Caitlin Dewey of the Washington Post compiled a list of tweets from the media about the situation.
Not a good start for CNN.
Stacy St. Clair writes about her hotel nightmare in the Chicago Tribune.
When the water eventually came back on at my hotel — my temporary housing for a night until my scheduled room could be finished — the water that poured through the faucet was dark yellow. It was the color of apple juice or a performance enhancing drug test specimen. The shower left what looked like fish food flakes coating the tub.
I took a picture of the water and tweeted it out.
“On the bright side,” I wrote, “I now know what dangerous face water looks like.”
Better make that triple Marriott points, Putin.