SOCHI, RUSSIA—Halfway through the Olympics, I brought four shirts in to be cleaned. They handed me a handwritten form more complex than a mortgage application.

When I returned to the laundry a day later, I was given two shirts.

“There were two more shirts.”

Nice twenty-something woman behind counter: “Yes.”

“Where are the other shirts?”

“Maybe tomorrow.”

“Maybe?”

“Yes. (five-second pause) Maybe.”

To the guy who is wearing my stolen shirts, enjoy them. I hope they keep you warm in the penal colony.

On the ground, Sochi was a pleasantly surreal experience; a small glimpse into what life in Russia must once have been and sort of still is.

Russians aren’t big on results. They are very big on process.

For instance — I stayed in a decent-ish hotel room that contained two single beds. The first night, I rolled over and right out of bed three times, smashing my head on the nightstand during the last of these trips.

So I pushed the beds together. It was a bit of an effort. They are oddly dense beds.

The next day, I get back to the room. The maid has pulled them apart again, replaced the nightstand and plugged a lamp back in.

Every evening, I’d push the beds together. Every morning, she’d pull them apart. I like to think of this as Our Thing.

There was a lot of talk when we got here that we were all being surveilled. Someone wrote somewhere that your computer would be hacked within a minute of connecting to the Internet in Russia.

So, to my hacker, I hope I haven’t scandalized you too much. I would prefer it if you waited until I got home before draining my bank accounts and stealing my identity. I can live without the money. I can’t survive the idea of being trapped penniless in the Domodedovo Airport for a decade.

All this talk of being watched led to a lot of healthy paranoia. I wrote a nasty piece about Vladimir Putin. The next morning, a note was slipped under my door: “Dear guest, Could you come to the reception please to clarify some information about you. Thank you! Reception.”

It was the exclamation mark that chilled me. I never went.

Someone sent me a lovely email advising me that I was “on the list” and that “you will be targeted”.

I wrote another nasty thing about Putin. When I got home that evening, the door to my hotel room was wide open. There was a key in the lock. Either my secret policeman was getting careless or cocky.

To combat this feeling, you need a safe place to hide. So you find a bar. A bar is your assembly point in case of disaster (and often the cause of it).

As Canadians, we are in the odd habit of finding The Worst Bar in (Country Name Here) wherever we go, and then claiming it. It’s our inferiority complex meeting our high-functioning alcoholism.

The place we chose is fetchingly named Bar Number Four. It was hideous, overlit and unfriendly. We loved it. It was run by an odd character named Ruslan.

Ruslan said he came from the back of beyond, but his English was perfect. He was deeply interested in each one of us, in our lives and political views. We grew suspicious.

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When a couple of Quebec journalists burst into the bar one night, already with a good head on them, Ruslan hailed them in excellent French. We never went back.

Instead, we moved down the road to a decrepit shack selling the vintages of the Krasnodar region. Neil Davidson of Canadian Press called it “The Wines of Mordor”.

Far too many nights refused to die at The Wines of Mordor. The jet lag never really let go of any of us. Seven times here — SEVEN! — I performed what is known in the business as a wraparound. I got up from the bar and went straight to breakfast. I will require long-term hospitalization when I get home.

Of course, you get sick. We all got sick. We’d go from the sweaty confines of The Wines of Mordor, out into the dawn chill, then back into the swampy cafeteria. It was good to get there early, when the breakfast smelt is fresh.

Here was another consistent Russian oddity — heat. Everywhere in Russia is heated like a sauna — the buses, the bars, your room. This must be some cultural echo from the bad old days, when everyone froze.

The radiator in my room pumped out heat like a blast furnace. I honestly worried the drapes would catch fire. It had no knobs. To combat this swelter, I left all the windows in the room open at all hours. Another thing that drove the maid insane.

The only thing that isn’t hot in Sochi is food and the water in your bathroom. That is uniformly lukewarm.

As it ended, we were preparing for the shakedown. Some of us were given lists of items in our rooms, and their replacement costs. A problem — many of the items weren’t in the rooms when we arrived. We have been warned that we will require a signed document from our maid (obviously a KGB colonel) before we can leave our compound. Fortunately, I saw this coming and have been tunnelling for days.

Much of this may sound ungracious. And it is.

But it is tinged with a real sense of concern about the people we leave behind here. Sochi was transformed for these Games, but with no eye to permanence. I’ll be back in four years for the 2018 World Cup. I expect much of what surrounds me as I write this to have been reclaimed by the earth.

So I worry about these people, and what they will do now. Every Russian under 25 I met here was heartbreakingly hopeful. You look around at where they live, at the people who lead them, and you wonder why that is.

I was struck late in the Games by an op-ed written by Masha Alekhina, one of the members of Pussy Riot. It was framed as a cry for help.

“The quasi-fascist direction of this regime over the past 13 years depends on a deadening of the intellect. For as soon as obliviousness ends, so does Mr. Putin’s power. Those who are writing about the Olympics and who are currently present at the Games should not fall into this forgetfulness, because it is fatal.”

This echoes a line from one of the great opponents and poets of Communism: “The struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting.”

Sochi was weird and, in its way, wonderful. It was also a Mammon temple built on the backs of people who didn’t need it and could ill-afford it.

Beyond the small inconveniences that I’ll be dining out on as war stories for years, that’s what I’m determined not to forget.