Typical Night

On Friday night my fearless Hungarian cohorts took me along to their new favorite place in Krasnoyarsk. It's a club called "Three Days of Rain," supposedly the hot spot for Krasnoyarsk's upper echelon. The inside looks like something from "Sex and the City," with an all white lounge-bar area where handsome young bartenders with their names embroidered on their jackets make fancy cocktails. Under the bar is the dance hall, where a female DJ wearing not much of a shirt was spinning mad jams and lots of ladies wearing a lot less than the DJ lady danced around on counters.

Apparently it's necessary to have some kind of cachet to be allowed in, if not beauty and wealth, a foreign accent also works. The first time my friends were there they ordered exclusively in English, despite the fact that they speak fluent Russian. In his own words: "I asked for a long island iced tea. I said Strong. Very strong! And it was very strong."

Waving around their foreignness got the boys an invitation to the VIP table where an overweight man with the nickname of a beloved cartoon character chills every night with ladies and whiskey. When I met this man he instructed me on how to live a healthy life. "Think about your children!" he said, as he scooped up a couple ice cubes from the neon blue ice cube pit in the middle of the table and poured a young lady a glass of Jameson. This guy is supposedly a big deal, rolling in dough, etc. so I was surprised when he asked me the same question that lots of people ask me: "Is it better there?" I would have thought that, at his VIP table, in his VIP club, with his blue ice cubes and ladies and Jameson, he would not be thinking about how life is probably better in America.

What a strange strange world we all live in. Getting down at Three Days of Rain, I once again found myself thinking "HOW did I get here? WHAT AM I DOING HERE?" It was fun, it was fascinating, and it was kind of horrible.

I was happy to wake up in the morning and have my last class with my favorite students--to remember all of the good people I know and remind myself that obsessive grooming and Mr. Cartoon Character are not all there is here.