Natasha and I ended up making it to Sochi. She ordered the tickets on Friday and I picked them up at the ticket office, since I was in the city center. The sign on the door said 'open 9:00-20:00 daily, no breaks,' but I entered to find someone clicking around on a computer behind a hand-lettered sign that said 'lunch, 13:00-14:00.' It was 13:30. I said hello, she told me it was lunch break, I said something along the lines of "but the door spoke no lunch," and facing the prospect me, with my strange accent and riddle-speak, plopped irritably for half an hour in the dishlike plastic chair in front of her desk, she relented and issued me the tickets.

We flew out of Домодедово, Domodedovo, where Natasha used to work at the Duty Free. From the train, she pointed out her old apartment in Domodedovo city, the customs headquarters (until recently, controlled by the Georgian mafia...deciding what enters and leaves Russia is really lucrative), and the staff parking lot where one winter she found her car missing and assumed it was stolen until the snow melted.

Figuring airports out is always harder with two people, especially when one of you is thinking "she knows what she's doing, she speaks the language" and the other one is thinking "she knows what she's doing, she travels a lot." We had had a too-leisurely coffee at one of the new cafes overlooking the tarmac (I could happily spend a day watching an airport go through its airport-motions), and ran to the gate to make final boarding (since when is it 40 minutes before the plane takes off?)

We landed in Sochi two hours later. The city's starting to see the first little tremors of Olympification (2014, in case you forgot the hoopla this summer), starting with the airport. Planes arrive in the new wing, a small and bright space-age fiberglass tennis-bubble made of little polygons. They still take off from the old wing, which is basically an exceptionally neglected and sprawling Greyhound station.

Natasha wanted to stay in one of the huge sanitoria on the Black Sea, so we spent the first couple hours wandering around those. She had heard that they were cheap and deserted and had hot springs, so both of us were all over it. The first one we went to was neo-Greek, sprawed out over acres, and creepy as hell in the dark. We didn't find anyone at reception there and managed to escape without being attacked by a cloud of vampire bats or something. The next couple places we went to were at least manned (or babushkied as the case may be), but it turns out you need a prescription just to get in the door. We were turned away by crotchety old ladies who couldn't believe we actually had the presumption to want to pay them to stay somewhere, took a marshrutka back into town, and ended up in Гостиница Москва, Hotel Moscow, the crappy behemoth in the center.

The next day we took a bus to Красная Поляна, the big ski resort in the Caucusus. The road climbs from the sea for a couple hours, past only forest, a giant braided stream, and a few bee farms here and there, until it gets to the smallish resort. (Natasha, knowing it's the winter playground of the Moscow glitterati, was surprised it wasn't cleaner and more developed. I can't imagine what it'll look like when Olympics construction begins in earnest). We tromped around for a while, enjoyed the mountain views, rented a blowup sled, managed not to harm innocent bystanders, and caught the bus back down.

The next day we caught a taxi and asked the guy to show us around the city for an hour or so (Natasha's into asking anybody and everybody for directions, where to eat, where to stay, what to do). He drove us into the nontouristy neighborhoods--steep streets lined with houses of cement, corrugated metal, and chain link, with a celebrity's dacha on the prime hilltop real estate. Most people who live there will be displaced into new apartment buildings to make way for Olympics construction. The cabby, Nikolai, took us back to the airport for our 9 pm flight back to Moscow. Natasha really liked the place and wanted to stay, mostly for the sea and the slower pace of life. I'm glad I saw it, but two days was enough.