Rather than gripe about the lack of amenities at his Sochi hotel room, one sportswriter from New Jersey made sure to carry-on some DIY spirit for his trek to cover the Winter Olympics.

The Newark Star-Ledger’s Steve Politi is one of the many reporters in Sochi to cover the games.

Unlike some reporters who arrived to find toxic water and missing lobbies, Politi says his room wasn’t so bad:

[T]he fact that my hotel room had towels, hot water and a queen-sized bed (okay, two twins pushed together but when I squint from afar it looks just like a Marriott!) offsets the fact that it doesn’t have a working TV, mini fridge, soap or a shower curtain.

He soon learned that the reason his shower lacked a curtain was because whoever built the hotel had failed to take into account that a shower curtain rod needs two walls to attach to. A curved or angled rod would also have worked, but his shower was nonetheless rod-free.

That’s when Politi remembered that his wife had made him take a clothesline and duct tape with him to Sochi. Thus, we was able to deploy a DIY shower curtain hanger at an angle across his hotel room’s shower.

Luckily, some colleagues who had arrived a few days earlier had alerted Politi to the fact that all the rooms lacked shower curtains, so he made sure to pick one up at Target before heading to Sochi.

As for that statement from earlier this week by Dmitry Kozak, the deputy prime minister responsible for the Olympic preparations, that he’d seen surveillance video from journalists’ hotel room bathrooms of them leaving water on all day, Politi is a bit skeptical.

He asks, “If you really had the manpower to install a video camera, do you think your engineers could have figured out the whole shower curtain thing?”

Sochi Olympics 2014: Camera surveillance in hotel rooms doesn’t scare this sportswriter [NJ.com]

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