You may have heard about the Olympic “bubble.” It’s a real thing.
If you’re outside the bubble, you’re dirty.
Inside it, you’re clean.
We move between bubbles of various cleanliness. The media hotels, somewhat clean but not really. The main press centre, utterly sterile.
To move from clean to dirty, you’ve got to pass through security. This has happen only on foot in my experience. Once clean, you can get on a bus, train, van or other vehicle to leave for another bubble.
When you leave the clean areas in a bus, it remains clean as long as no doors are opened. Doors include windows, skylights, luggage compartments, the mechanical guts and, of course, the doors themselves. Each of these is secured with a sticker. The stickers don’t secure the doors like a lock – they can still be opened – but they show if any door has been opened. If a sticker is broken, the bus is deemed dirty.
The security crews take these stickers very seriously.
There are also stickers inside the busses.
The bus – the second of five vehicles -- I take from the main press centre to the Gorki press centre in the mountains has departed and arrived clean but now departs and arrives dirty.
Why? Because Russia.
I’ve learned not to ask questions. My go to word is pochimu. почему in Cyrillic. It means why in Russian. It gets a laugh but never an answer. For the person I’m asking, it’s always funny that I’d expect one.
One day while our cleanliness was being established at a checkpoint, we were delayed 15 minutes. An officer – they’re the ones wearing the intimidating purple and pink uniforms -- had noticed a broken sticker on the luggage compartment of the bus. They made notes, took pictures and documented the breach.
In the meantime, the passengers were getting restless and some angry. It’s not like we ever get an explanation. Anyway, we can’t ask why. (See above.)
An Estonian television reporter started knocking loudly on the window above the security guard who was documenting the broken sticker. Then he started banging. He got no response and was never acknowledged.
He started to laugh and turned to his cameraman who started filming.
The bus finally started and moved forward. But we weren't qutie there yet.
When we arrived at the base of the gondola (the fourth of five vehicles that take me to work each day), we were told to exit the bus before the clean zone. We were deemed dirty again and had to go through another airport-style security checkpoint: jackets off, bags scanned, pockets emptied, full body pat-down. It was my third one that day.
The Estonian crew started rolling.
Everyone’s got a job to do.
