Travel notes

Night Adler met us with fresh breeze, bright illumination and baker’s dozen of wish to earn some money taxi-drivers. I’ve converged in price with one of them. A half-hour trip to Sochi made a strange impression: growing along the road greens sharply contrast with made of colored lanterns figures of ice-hockey players, skaters and bobsledders. The road is good and smooth but too much narrow in some places, so it’s a little bit hard to relax when oncoming vehicles suddenly appears from the turning.
It feels the City changed under the influence of last year’s winter Olympic Games, but most of this changes concerns infrastructure around the city and ski resorts, so it’s hard to say the city changed beyond recognition. Certainly the image of Sochi has been changed by new high-rises, because of them the city looks more contemporary. But on the whole, the unique cozy atmosphere did not disappear under the pressure of cash flows, rushed here before and during the Olympic Games. This atmosphere is made of many things, like blowing everywhere plants, cats that are walking by themselves, fresh seaside air. Strolling through the center of the city, you can suddenly stumble across something unusual, the monument to the horse in a coat, for example. The horse in a coat is a Russian language figure of speech. When somebody ask a “who” question and you don’t know the answer or you know the exact answer and you are sure the man who asking you could guess it easily, you can answer ironically: “the horse in a coat”. So there is a metallic horse in solid coat and with a hat on its head, sitting on the chair crossed its legs and smiling. The horse holds the glass of wine (it should be the wine in its glass, I’m sure) and smoke a pipe. There is no any base for this statue, the chair with horse on it is just placed as a regular bench on the sidewalk, next to one of the houses. There are a lot of such statues in the city, and all of them fit perfectly into the surrounding urban environment.
Anyway, not the whole city could be called really cozy and harmonious. To go a little bit away from the city center is enough for incompleteness or the lack of forethought of some urban projects to become obvious. Not everywhere is convenient to go on foot, try to find where to cross the Sochi River not by car, for example. On the other hand, such things help to discover the modern, alive city, which hasn’t been completely covered by asphalt yet. This city can impress you, just let it do so.