Sochi Now a Ghost Town After Winter Olympics (PHOTOS)

It's always an honor for a country to host the prestigious Olympics and therefore, when Russia won the bid to host the 2014 Winter Olympics, it spared no expense to convert the beach town of Sochi into a world-class resort town. But now that the event is over, the town sits abandoned and has become just another ghost town.

Infrastructure in Sochi had been a problem even before the Olympics started. An estimated $51 billion was poured in by the government to transform the town but days ahead of the games, the hotels were barely finished. Lobbies didn't have floors; toilets didn't have plumbing and doors and windows were missing in rooms.

The infrastructure failures spawned a twitter account - "Sochi Problems" - where visiting athletes and journalists posted wide evidence of the lack of basic amenities in Sochi.

Even though the world mocked Sochi's inability to be hospitable, the games were held and the event finally concluded amid much fanfare.

But just a week after the event, as population started waning, the stark incomplete structures fell into a desolate lull.

It has been a little more than six months now and Sochi still stands hardly inhabited. Last week, Russian photographer Alexander Belenkiy visited Sochi and took some pictures of the deserted town. See how Sochi looks right now:

You can see more pictures on his blog here.

Meanwhile, Sochi is almost completing construction on its F1 racing track. It is all geared up to host the Russian Grand Prix in October, this year. Racer Sebastian Vettel recently took a lap of the F1 circuit and said that the track is a "good mix of high speed corners and technical sections."

"It's going to be a huge challenge in a Formula One car for sure and I'm really looking forward to coming back in October," Vettel was quoted by CrashNet.com.