Of course we all dress like Britney...

Last night, Katie, Sophia and I decided to go out for a drink. This is not as easy as it seems, as in Russia there aren’t really pubs –it’s either a restaurant or a nightclub, the latter of which means strict dress codes, inflated prices and ‘face control.’ As this is about as far from our scene as you can get, going out in the evening in Russia has been limited – certainly in central Moscow it is difficult to find anything that isn’t an incredibly up-itself swanky nightclub for Moscow’s nouveau-riche. After initially drinking mojits in what was essentially a coffee shop, we resorted on the second night to drinking beer in the hostel, which was where the extended conversation with the Indian-Malaysians that disrupted the blogging came into it all.

Given this, we were quite excited when Katia recommended to us a Beatles-themed café and bar called Yellow Submarine, which has food, beer and live music. The bar itself was fun (and very sixties/seventies- themed, with prog-style airbrushed portraits of bands on the walls and every item on the menu named after a Beatles song), but unfortunately Katie, Sophia and I were then cornered by a young Russian guy, who despite having quite limited English claimed to work as an English-Russian translator and interpreter (if he does, it would explain a lot about the quality of English translations in these parts). In the course of the evening he berated Sophia for the crime of being German, sang loudly and terribly to ‘accompany’ the singer who was playing, claimed that when he met Italians they’d all flashed him to show that they had ‘big balls,’ and, most bizzarely of all, repeatedly insisted on wanting to touch Katie’s nose. When, after about two hours of interesting ‘conversation’ he eventually decided to go to the toilet, we quickly paid for our food and beers and made a hasty getaway for fear of another two hours in his company.

He was absolutely desperate to impress, and talking about Sophia about her experiences in Tomsk and to Katia about modern Russia, it seems that most young Russians are, like him desperate to be ‘western’ (although few are strange freaks like he was). However, as few have had the opportunity to travel outside the country, most of the information Russians have about western fashions and culture comes from the songs, films, and TV. This has led to some interesting misconceptions –our friend last night was mightily confused as to why the few foreign travellers he has encountered do not try to dress like Britney Spears, who is apparently the pinnacle of style among young Russians. We tried to explain that basing your fashion choices on the decisions of a woman who has a history of failing to wear underwear, shaving her head and hitting a photographer’s car with an umbrella might not be the wisest policy, but he continued to insist that young Russian girls (rightly in his view) aspire to look like Britney. Apparently Sex and the City is also very popular here, which explains why so many Russian women insist on teetering about in four inch heels despite the fact that the ground is covered in ice. According to Sophia, the female students in Tomsk all dress like this despite the -40C temperatures, and bulimia and anorexia are big problems.

This obsession with image, fashion and style may also explain why Russian clubs, even outside of Moscow, try so hard to be ‘cosmopolitan,’ Although it did have the Yellow Submarine, Ekaterinburg also boasts the most ridiculously try-hard concept for a club that I have ever seen; a club cum car park. At Park King, you pay to drive your car – provided, of course, that it passes the desirability test - into what is essentially a car park. The ‘music’ is then provided by the assembled cars (resulting, I imagine, in a hideous cacophony of techno and bad house), and drinks are served at inflated prices. This seems not only stupid, but a surefire way of ensuring that your formerly desirable car will end the night scratched and covered in sick. Right.

At the moment, being young and Russian thus appears to be a labour-intensive and rather thankless business – being freezing and tottering around in -30 temperatures to try and look like a TV star doesn’t really sound like a particularly fulfilling way to go about life. Possibly if more actual opportunities become available to young Russians, and if they ever get the chance to see a bit more of the world, this try-hard desperation will lessen, but at the moment I do feel a bit sorry for them. Except for our friend last night. He'd be weird anywhere.