Hi everybody!

I’m just back home from the nice city of Sochi, where I had the luck to take part of Sochi Open ’09.
First of all I have to say thanks to minigolfnews.com and the organizer ‘Olympyisky Dagomys Hotel and Minigolf Club for providing me a free stay for the competition.
The travelling team contained Austrian national players Berger-Rella Lisa and Berger Markus, Austrian Junior head coach Hannes Hahsler, Berger Ilse and Christian Adler also from Austria, and me and my father, István from Hungary.

I promised to write my impressions about the trip, but I realized, that it is almost impossible to write everything in a blog. So I decided to share some useful infos with you, especially for those, who are travelling to Sochi next year. In this post you can find general infos about the place, and in the other one specifically about the lanes.

We arrived on the 5th of October to Sochi by the direct flight from Vienna, early morning.
The hotel is located around one hour way by car from the airport. It is not a big surprise, as Sochi is officially the 2nd longest city of the world after Los Angeles (around 150 km-s), the hotel is around 1 hour way from the airport.
The hotel sent a bus for us to the airport. Xenia, employee of the hotel had already been waiting for us, and she was our right hand during the whole stay.

My most surprising first impression was the weather. While I was playing normally cold, rainy tournaments in October, Sochi waited for us with sunshine, pleasant 25 degrees warm and some palm trees. It stayed so all week long, only in evenings should we put on warmer things. Sochi might be a great location of EC in the future. :)

The hotel is located in region Dagomys, between the mountains and the Black sea. The organizers provided full board, so we could spend our breakfast, lunch and dinner in the hotel without visiting a supermarket at all during our stay.
The hotel has a swimming pool – actually with quite cold water - and a private beach, which is located around 10 minutes walk from the complex. The sea temperature was 22 degrees, we could swim in it without feeling cold…

The Mos beton course is in the hotel garden, the lanes lay on plateaus gouged into the hillside. It is probably one of the nicest, but the hardest terrain, where you can play minigolf, as there is around 20 m heights difference between lane 1 and 9, and you have to go back up again to lane 18, as that is just beside lane 1. After the first training days I felt little stiff, and I kept imagine myself as a coach here for a one-week long championship. I think we should consider to rise the minimum number of coaches per nations to 3, if it is not a problem for anyone.
The new eternite is covered by the building of the hotel, so wind and rain don’t play any significant rule here.

After the competition we had a very nice closing ceremony, with shows, prestigious gifts and fireworks at the end. Later we were invited for a banquet with buffet, which we all enjoyed very much.

I’m sure that the Russians will be a perfect organizer of the next years Youth Championships, and I hope that I can come back to participate at Sochi Open next year, to meet with my friends there and maybe defend my title.

Csaba Pálinkás