Over 4,000 exotic tropical fish died at an airport in Sochi after being kept in customs for hours in the summer heat. “The 18-ton cargo, containing over 4,000 exotic fish from China, was standing at customs at Sochi Airport for more than 14 hours in quite hot weather”… customs deny it was their fault, and claim owners did not submit proper paperwork.

The fish was intended for the brand new Sоchi Discovery World – world class, 6 700 sq. meters, $25 mln oceanarium which was scheduled to open during the 8th International Investment Forum Sochi-2009 (starts on September 17). Hm, around $480,000 in investments into Sochi lost while trying to “decorate” investment forum in Sochi… quite symbolic, I think.

Well, according to the head of the oceanarium they are going to try to open as scheduled…

You can read the full story at Russia Today: Thousands of exotic fish boiled alive in Sochi airport

About a week ago domain name Sochi.ru – which hosted popular city portal with forums, classifieds, events calendar, news, etc. – was transferred to Organizing Committee “Sochi 2014”.

Why and how this happened is a bit of a mystery. Originally, on August 19, an announcement was posted on the website that the popular portal will move to a new domain – Sochi.com, and included statement that “by the order of the Government of the Russian Federation administration of domain name Sochi.ru goes over to the Organizing Committee “Sochi 2014″”… but later that sentence was removed from the announcement.

Neither Organizing Committee nor previous owner commented this to the media. Most news agencies quoted head of PR of the Ru-Center, .RU’s official domain names registration center, mentioning the “Olympic Law”, which basically makes anything with Sochi Olympics logo and other Olympics-related symbols (and that includes domain names) property of the Organizing Committee. However, not only that makes no sense, since Sochi.com is not much different from Sochi.ru in this respect, but also only combinations of “Sochi” and “2014” fall under that law — this was discussed and explained at the time when this law came into effect.

But this is a done deal – WHOIS info already shows “Organizing Committee “Sochi 2014″” as Sochi.ru’s registrant, and the copy of the original portal already spinning at the Sochi.com. According to the original announcement, anyone who has @sochi.ru email address and all third level domains will exist until the end of this year.

I wonder what project will spin at this address next.

Aeroflot Russian Airlines, Russia’s biggest airline carrier, has been picked as a General Partner for the 2014 Games in the Sochi 2014 Passenger Air Transportation Services category.

The only interesting thing I gather of this news story as far as this blog goes is following statement from the press release: “As part of its partnership programme Aeroflot will increase the number of regular flights bound for Sochi and launch new direct flights from Sochi to parts of Europe.”

The only direct regular flight I know of between Sochi and European city that exist today is Sochi-Vienna operated by Austrian Airlines.

Full press release on this news with other details is available on official Sochi 2014 website.

A hotel in Adler’s center.

Central Post Office in the Central district.

Orthodox church in Adler.

Here are a few more: Read the rest of this entry »

I might as well post list of airlines that I know fly to Sochi from Moscow and St. Petersburg: Read the rest of this entry »

Only 3 airlines have direct flights to Sochi — Russia’s largest summer resort, from Saint-Petersburg — Russia’s second largest city, a home to over 4.5 million people… in the middle of the summer season. One of them flies with a stop in Krasnodar (that adds several hrs to your travel time), and another one of the three only flies 4 times a week.

Compare this to 12 (!) airlines (that I know of, there could be more) that have direct flights between Sochi and Moscow.

Many other cities have it worse than St. Petes, there either no flights, or flights only a couple of days a week. There’s no competition, and because it’s the middle of the vacationing season there are no special deals. This makes Sochi one very expensive destination to fly to.

Consider this: s Saint-Petersburg – Sochi round trip flight in the first half of August with convenient weekdays (weekends) and departure times on “Russia Airlines” – the only one that has direct, non-stop flights daily – costs 548,00 EUR ! And this is with 5% off for buying tickets online already calc’ed in.

At the same time there are plenty tours (which include travel, accommodation, and, often, food) offered to Egypt, Turkey, Bulgaria, and resorts in other countries for approximately the same price or even lower… while I couldn’t find anything similar for Sochi, or any other resort on Russia’s south.

And comparing these prices to the deals available on inter-European flights from low-cost European airlines, all this drives me crazy.

A couple of photos I found on Flickr today…

Sochi – Cheltenham’s sister city

“Cheltenham’s sister cities.” (c) Dave Hanmer

Sochi’s sister cities, or twin cities…

Luring you in…

(c) Masha Kuvshinova

Sign reads: “Holiday romance is your dream! It will realize in Sochi! Come…” :-)

“Mercer publishes rankings for 240 cities, and … is expanding the list to include two unlikely places due to high demand: Sochi, Russia – site of the 2014 Winter Olympics – and the North Korean capital, Pyongyang.” This is a quote from the swissinfo.ch article on importance of the city ranks and surveys for global companies.

Mercer is the highly regarded consulting company, which, among other things, surveys cities and ranks them on various topics. The two popular surveys you most often see the media discuss are Quality of Living and Cost of Living surveys. The latter one is popular in Russia to discuss, as Moscow tops it year after year for god knows how long now.

Such surveys are often used by global companies when making decisions on opening new offices abroad. The same article cites Mercer’s Geneva office say “1,600 companies pay membership fees to have access to all of the consultancy’s data, and another 18,000 place orders for various surveys.”

Does anyone reading have access to the complete Quality of Living published in April ’09? I wonder if Sochi was already included, and I wonder how it did :)

I’m going to Sochi for the New Year, yay! I just hope the flight won’t be delayed, as my flight is at 7pm :) The only comforting thought is that it’s Aeroflot flight, and in my experience they’ve been very reliable in being on-time. Unlike SkyExpress. Since I moved to St. Petersburg two month ago, I’ve spent most weekends in Moscow, thanks to the reasonable rates at SkyExpress . However every flight back to SPb was delayed! On the last trip the flight to Moscow was combined with another SE flight that they delayed for several hours, and on the way back my flight was delayed 6 hrs. The good think they did sent me text message about the delay, and I ended up meeting my friends from Sochi Music College (now called Sochi College of Arts, or something like that), who now live in Moscow. So, this time it worked out Ok.

All cheap tickets to Sochi for Dec 30-31^st on all airlines were sold out about a month in advance. My Moscow-Sochi-Moscow tickets ended up being 515€. If you’re looking for tickets now, check out Aeroflot first, they have many flights there on 31st, and probably will still have tickets.

I’ll be in Sochi from 31st to 8th. No particular plans yet, we’ll probably go out clubbing with friends, or get together at someone’s place. What are your New Year plans?

Vladimir Putin, working as the Russian Prime Minister these days, invited countries of Eurasian Economic Community (EurAsEC) to build hotels near the future Olympic park in Sochi. He suggests they name hotels by the names of their country’s capitals, and use it to promote their countries and cultures.

Besides Russia, members of EurAsEC are Belarus, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, and Tajikistan. If they accept the idea and join the project, Sochi can have complex of hotels where visitors will learn cultural specifics and traditions of these countries.

Detour road in Sochi, December 2008

This is an approximate map for the previous post about new section of the detour road around Sochi‘s central district. Just help to visually understand whats going on.

The map was made by user Dali of the forum at allsochi.info.

Another section or “ring” or detour road around Sochi’s center was opened yesterday. Here are some details about this road:

• The road will do from Mamaika district in the Sochi’s center to the area around International Youth Center «Sputnik» in Khosta;
• Construction started in 1988, but was quickly frozen until 1998;
• First section was opened in 2001 from Sputnik, it includes one (if I remember correctly) tunnel and a couple of bridges; it’s 4.5 km long;
• Newly completed section is 4.2km long, and according to Russian media it includes 2 tunnels and seven bridges;
• They are promising to complete the road by the end of 2009.

Some believe it will solve half traffic problems by routing people who are not going to the Sochi’s Central district around it, which sounds like a great idea. But keep in mind following when you reading about this road in the news: First of, the detour road already exist – yes, it’s in pretty bad condition, but it covers pretty much the same route… and it doesn’t solve anything! Maybe if they fix the existing road and there will be two of them it will help the Center, but I haven’t heard of these plans. Secondly, if they route all the construction vehicles there, as the plan to, this will simply destroy this the road, and the rest of the people will continue going through the center continuing jamming traffic there. And thirdly, I’m glad they’re thinking about Central district, but Adler, where Olympics are planed is in no less, and maybe even in more need to improve road infrastructure… yet I know of very few plans to improve it. One of which is to re-route railroad which currently crosses main road in Adler, and constantly causing traffic jams and interruption in public transport, which goes of route to avoid that place, leaving people in some areas with very few ways to get around. But even fixing this is nowhere near to be enough.

Past summer I was asked about direct flights between Sochi and Dubai, as I wrote about ’em before. I knew there are direct flights, but I couldn’t find any info about it at that point in time, even on the official «Aeroflot-Don»’s website, which operates this route. That was strange to me, since I’ve read many times that AD has regular direct flights, and my close friend brags about going there every year. I did ask my friend about the flight, I told him that I can’t find any info about it, but he said it exists and we can call right now to find out the details. Sitting at the beach in burning sun on a beautiful September day we didn’t, but when couple of weeks ago he told me they’re going to OAE again, I figured I gotta find out what’s the deal is.

Turns out these flight are only regular during winter season. This also includes flights to Istanbul, Turkey, and Gyumri, Armenia. And the information about them is now available on «Aeroflot-Don»’s website (Russian only).

Sochi (Russia) — Dubai (OAE)
Flights period: 28.10.2008 – 24.03.2009
Once a week, every Tuesday.

Sochi (Russia) — Istanbul (Turkey)
Flights period: 27.10.2008 – 27.03.2009
Monday, Wednesday, Friday

Sochi (Russia) — Gyumri (Armenia)
Flights period: 20.11 – 25.12.2008, 08.01 – 26.03.2009
Once a week, every Thursday.

So, there it is. Apparently there are no direct flights to these cities from Sochi during summer.

And as a reminder, Australian Airlines operates regular direct flights between Sochi and Vienna.

Since I’m still not finding much time to write more about Sochi, here are some short news that have been happening recently:

Financial crisis and Sochi investment projects

Amid the global financial crisis and the news that many investors are wrapping up their big real estate projects all around Russia and around World, not a single investor withdrew from the already concrete Olympic projects in Sochi – which is good news. However, new investors are not so quick to jump in anymore, so, the promised Government’s financial guarantees will come handy after all, I guess.

Georgia changes it’s mind

Georgia, which was one of the first to congratulate Russia on winning the Olympics bid, and who’s president said he supported Sochi bid from the beginning.. Same Georgia which then started a war on the first day of the Olympics in Beijing – something that western media was quick to call “Russian propaganda”, but more recently admitted it was Georgia who started it, and finally even Georgian president admitted giving the order to attack South Ossetia after high ranking Georgian official publicly said the same thing… That same Georgia few days ago tried to appeal to IOC to move Olympics from Sochi to another city – the move that IOC has quickly dismissed.

I think now Georgian or Abkhazian question in Sochi Olympics formula is finally closed forever: Georgia attacked Abkhazia (along with Ossetia) → Georgia lost → Russia officially recognized Abkhazia’s independence, which means Abkhazia can help with constructions and will benefit from increased tourism flow to the region → Russian troops will anchor for now in Abkhazia to ensure the region’s stability → IOC acknowledges Sochi is a safe city for the Olympics, the World class event – the cycle is complete for the next decade.

Explosions investigation

Three persons were detained in connection with explosions in Sochi that occurred earlier this year. No details yet, though.

Recently elected (four month ago) Sochi mayor has quit last night. The official reason — health problems. He’s getting back surgery which will have him out for over three months. But I found interesting what Fetisov (legendary hockey player; today he’s one of the top sports officials in Russia) said: Mayor, of course, is an important figure, but today this process is controlled Prime Minister (Vladimir Putin), and the President (Dmitriy Medvedev), and I think that mayors retirement can not affect any details in Sochi Olympics preparation plans… Is maoyr of Sochi has become an insignificant position due to the such attention for above? Is it a lot harder to get a “piece of pie” of Olympic money? .. I think these are the things people will talk about. Meanwhile another person was set to be acting mayor. He’s not Sochi native, which again wll piss off many residents.