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Although visitors will eat most meals in their hotels, 150 restaurants, cafés and snack bars are being built near the Olympic sites and on main thoroughfares. The new eateries will serve European food, Soviet regional specialties and such national favorites as blini (pan cakes), borscht (beet soup with sour cream) and pelmeni (stuffed dumplings).
At the events, spectators will be able to choose from smoked salmon, caviar and sliced sausages. Drinks include hot tea, vodka, or Coca-Cola and its orange-flavored cousin, Fanta, dispensed by strolling vendors through a tube from a backpack tank. (Pepsi-Cola has been available in the U.S.S.R. for six years, but Coke won the Olympic bidding.) Not to be outdone in the soda race, the Soviets have invented their own Olympic drink, Druzhba, a cranberry-apple concoction.
But despite the best efforts of the Druzhba generation, it was plain last week that there will be problems in 1980. For ordinary tourists, the chief difficulties will be lack of time and flexibility. Most Americans will be on multicity package tours that include only five days in Moscow, usually not enough to follow an event from trials to finals. Tickets for sporting events, as well as for cultural activities be on a take-it-or-leave-it basis, though "barter booths" will be set up in hotel lobbies to allow spectators to swap unwanted tickets. There will be some agonizing choices. Faced with a 7 p.m curtain at the Bolshoi and an Olympic event it the same time—most finals are scheduled for the evening—some tourists will doubtless go home unsatisfied.
Despite the drawbacks, 12,000 of the 17,000 tour places allotted to Americans have already been spoken for. (All travel and ticket arrangements are being handled by the Russian Travel Bureau, an American-owned firm in New York.) The tour prices—$1,550 for 15 days, $1,850 for 22 days—include most meals, sightseeing entertainment and "first class" accommodations, which are far less opulent than their typical Western equivalents. Tickets to Olympic events, which cost anywhere from $3 to $38, are extra.
After covering the first week of Spartakiad in Moscow, TIME Sports Editor B.J. Phillips offered some survival tips for Olympic travelers:
"The sports facilities are impressive the amenities anything but. Toilets are few, far between and largely unsanitary. Every mother's advice has never been more apropos: 'Go to the bathroom before you leave.' Bring a seat cushion—most of the stands are bleacher-style seating—and a pair of powerful binoculars to use in the immense stadiums. If possible, take taxis, buses and subways. Don't drive yourself: street signs are almost all in Russian and left turns are illegal in Moscow. Above all, be patient."
While Westerners fretted about language difficulties and transportation, Soviet officialdom worried aloud about sinister influences. The chief of the Moscow City Communist Party, Politburo Member Viktor Grishin, said Muscovites should be cordial to visitors, but he exhorted them to "stress the advantages of the Soviet way of life ... and repulse the propaganda of alien ideas and principles "