Last month Sochi hosted finals of the Beach Volleyball European Championship Tour 2009. Here’s slide show from the event.

(c) piratenergy

I a few amazing lightning-over-the-sea photos taken by other people in Sochi, and wanted to share with you.

The photos are clickable, and lead to the large size originals.

Taken in Dagomys district of Sochi (c) v_kryukov53

Taken in Adler district of Sochi (c) pmirosevic

More amazing photos » Read the rest of this entry »

Nissan Russian Adventure 2010 (formerly known as Nissan Caucasus Classic) is once again coming to Sochi on January 21, 2010.

Nissan Russian Adventure will take place at the ski resort Krasnaya Polyana in the Western Caucasus. Krasnaya Polyana is the host of the alpine and nordic ski events of the 2014 Winter Olympics with Sochi as host city. Sometimes called the “Russian Courchevel”, Krasnaya Polyana is the most sophisticated ski and snowboard resort in Russia, located just 45 minutes from the Black Sea, and well known as President Putin’s favourite holiday resort. It is also famous for its awesome heliskiing in the spectacular Caucasus mountain range.

The contest is organised by renowned Russian extreme skier Nikolay Veselovskiy, who is also chief heliskiing operator in the area and pioneer of heli-skiing in Kamchatka. For the qualifying run the contest will take place at the actual Krasnaya Polyana Mountain very accessible for the public. The final run with 22 riders will be held on another peak with heli access. The exact peak will be determined depending on where the best snow conditions are to be found. The snow quality is quite unique in the area as the great proximity of the sea produces a characteristic snow that sticks to the steepest angles.

— nissanrussianadventure.com

Here are couple of photos by E. Vasenyov from last year’s event:

(c) 360sca

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 »

Today I bring you Black Sea with an attitude! :)

(c) argall

(c) shunk

(c) maximb68

And six more:  Read the rest of this entry »

Tornadoes are actually quite common in Sochi, though are not as large as the ones destroying whole towns in USA. However, in Sochi they often cause havoc as well. Twisters in Sochi usually form over the Black Sea during stormy weather, then coming down crushing at the city. Two years ago in August, strong tornado came in destroying residential houses (our family friend’s house was almost completely destroyed — and these are brick houses!), part of «Youzhnye Kultury» park, and many buses on overnight bus parking, causing public transportation interruption in Adler for the next few weeks.

I Found these amazing photos at 50hz.ru by Alex A. Bel. , I’ve never seen one this big over there! They have more, check ’em out. These photos are from Adler district.

My friend Arkasha, who works in Krasnaya Polyana, sent me recently a few photos he took there with his mobile phone. Check ’em out:

Larger images inside. Also, “Aibga” Hotel fire photos » Read the rest of this entry »

Recently a new free online audio language learning service was launched. It has yummy name and provides lessons for several popular languages, including Russian.  There are many websites online that teach Russian language, this one by far the best one I’ve seen. In fact I’m writing about it only because I was impressed with it so much! It’s simple, has clean and intuitive interface, the quality of learning material and quality of audio is great, there’s a lot of the materials, and it’s free!

The course is for the beginners, and if you ever flirted with the idea of learning some Russian head on to the TryMango.com and give it a shot. The sign up process is painless, it doesn’t require activation via email, and you don’t even need a password!

There are 100 lessons available, and all audio material is done by native speakers. The Russian course is Read the rest of this entry »

The finals of the international Missis World 2007 pageant took place tonight in «Zimny» Theater in Sochi, Russia. And here are the results!

Missis World 2007: Mrs. America – Diane Tucker
Missis Benevolence: Mrs. Canada – Mai-Lea Dejong
Missis Fitness: Mrs. Russia – Maria Gufronova
Best Dress: Mrs. France – Rejane Klein Maurer

Video 

I found three video clips on different Russian news sites. All three are different, some are from before the event, some are videos of the event itself. But they all have Russian narration. If you want to see the picture, here’s the list with instructions. Also, below I’m posting a few screenshots from two of those clips. Tip: if the playback is faster then the download and the video is jerking, press pause button after playback begun, and give it a little time to buffer data up; then press play button again to watch the video.

Screnshots

Read the rest of this entry »

These are just photos from the Mrs World website, they are not from Zimny Theater. If I find photos from the event in Sochi I’ll post ’em here too. Update: event photos and links to videos in the new post.

Missis World 2007

Mrs. America – Diane Tucker

Missis Benevolence

Mrs. Canada – Mai-Lea Dejong

Missis Fitness

Mrs. Russia – Maria Gufronova

Best dress

Mrs. France – Rejane Klein Maurer

Photos (c) MrsWorld.com

This is a video clip of Agury waterwalls in Khosta district. It was probably taped in spring, because during summer there isn’t that much water in the river.

I haven’t had a chance to write about Sochi events in last few days, today too. So, today I’m just going to show you a few pics of Sochi I found on Flickr.com.

Today we’ll look at the train terminal in Central district. It is definitely one of the coolest architectural structures in Sochi. The main tower has a huge clock, which has signs of the zodiac instead of numbers, as you can see on one of the pictures. The terminal was recently reconstructed and now looks great. In front of this terminal is also Sochi’s main bus terminal, from where buses go in all directions, and also to other cities. However, many international buses operating by private companies do not leave from this terminal.

Here are lager photos: Read the rest of this entry »

Video recorded and compiled by a couple of guys paragliding over Krasnaya Polyana, with some nice shots of surrounding nature.

RuTube is a clone of YouTube