That's no worse than places I've stayed in Romania or Ukraine or St Petersburg; being encouraged not to flush toilet paper is routine in quite a lot of the world, and I've stayed in several hotels where the water comes out of the tap brown and you just don't use it. If they're paying Manhattan-5*-hotel prices for it, it's understandable that they might be cross, but much of the reporting strikes me as people who've not encountered a foreign hotel before.
I rather expect that the "olympic experience" is in catering to the entire (Western) world in a fashion that keeps them in the manner to which they've become accustomed. But that could be so cynical as to just not be the case.
What I find rather interesting about this whole mess is I don't quite remember the same level of loathing and public outrage being flung around when the summer olympics were held in China. But perhaps the level was this high or higher, it just wasn't as visible to me personally for one reason or another.
China is, famously, competent; and the China Olympics were an enormous domestic event as well as a window for the West. I stayed in generic cheap-ish hotels in China in 2010, and they were vastly better than anywhere post-Soviet that I'd been - rather better than generic cheap-ish hotels in generally-much-richer Taiwan five years earlier - and nothing like as bad as the Sochi reports.
That certainly may be; I was more pointing out that China has certainly presented plenty of opportunity for Western socio-political outrage, and for some reason, the fuss now seems louder. A well deserved fuss in many cases, granted, but nonetheless.
Try "not encountered a former Soviet-bloc hotel before". The toilet-paper rule is found worldwide, "light fixtures fall from the ceiling in the middle of the night" is not, nor is "opened door to find construction workers napping in bed".
There is a distinction between "bring your own toilet paper" and "the lobby is choked with construction debris". Not to mention the lulu of a story that came out of a press conference today (multiple witnesses). Paraphrasing from memory:
Russian official: We know that the reporters are deliberately sabotaging their rooms. We have security video of them pointing the shower head at the wall, turning the shower on, and leaving the room.
PR representative, brightly: Let's go tour the media center!
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What I find rather interesting about this whole mess is I don't quite remember the same level of loathing and public outrage being flung around when the summer olympics were held in China. But perhaps the level was this high or higher, it just wasn't as visible to me personally for one reason or another.
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There is a distinction between "bring your own toilet paper" and "the lobby is choked with construction debris". Not to mention the lulu of a story that came out of a press conference today (multiple witnesses). Paraphrasing from memory:
Russian official: We know that the reporters are deliberately sabotaging their rooms. We have security video of them pointing the shower head at the wall, turning the shower on, and leaving the room.
PR representative, brightly: Let's go tour the media center!
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