get-together I had to move on to the next destination.
W hen I told them I was banging a twenty–three year old Russian girl, my friends back home went crazy. Especially since I was already in my early thirties.
Russia – Kazan
Kazan is a medium-sized city, which in Russia means it only has well over a million people. I arrived late at night and luckily the owner of the hostel was waiting for me. She was a young woman, about twenty-seven years old, and she lived in an apartment on the outskirts of the city. The hostel itself was basically just an apartment with one room that served as a dorm. I was the only one there. The next day was a Friday and I went to the city center by bus. The buses were dirt cheap, only thirty rubles a ride. Every bus has a girl collecting the money and I pissed mine off because I only had a thousand-ruble note with me. It didn’t help that I couldn’t speak back to her and just kept shrugging my shoulders as she tried to find 970 rubles change. That’s one girl I did not manage to add to my shagging diary.
That day and the next day I walked all over the city centre and was taking pictures of everything. The Kazan Kremlin is very beautiful, and since it was the weekend there were a lot of weddings going on, with all the bridesmaid-eye candy that implies. Kazan is one of Russia’s Islamic provinces, with a lot of Turkish-descended people around. That can mean only one thing: Döner kebab places. There’s nothing better than burying your face into a giant kebab after a long day of walking around. There was also a big McDonald’s, so I knew I wouldn’t starve.
In the main shopping street I sat down next to some cute girls who didn’t pay attention to me until I pulled out my street map and it became obvious I was a tourist. Their attitude changed immediately and they started talking to me. Of course they didn’t speak English and I tried to talk some extremely bad Russian but that didn’t help either. I bailed out the moment it became awkward to try to talk to them any longer, and later I went to the train station and bought a ticket to Yekaterinburg for the next day.
Back in the hostel some boring backpackers had arrived but they didn’t want to go out at night. I had a look in the Russian Lonely planet and read there was a small salsa bar named Cuba Libre not too far away. I thought, What the hell, and went there. It was a small place indeed, with just one bar and a small dance floor. I talked to a platinum blonde girl with big boobs at the bar who looked interested at first. She spoke a little bit of English, but she lost interest after she found out I was not going to stay long. So I walked up to two girls on the dance floor and started dancing with them. The cuter of the two was a skinny girl from Moscow. She was nice and spoke reasonable English, but she also had absolutely no interest in flirting.
At the table next to us there were three girls who were drinking and dancing a lot. One of them had massive knockers that were almost falling out of her dress. One of the others was skinny and had a cute sexy face; the third girl was skinny but not that good-looking. I danced a bit with them, but that was it: I couldn’t get the conversation going and the one with the big knockers danced with some other guy. At least I tried, I thought to myself, and decided to go back to the hostel. Things weren’t going anywhere, and I didn’t expect anything to happen. I was wrong.
I was waiting for the toilet to be free when the three girls pulled me out of the line and outside the bar to smoke a cigarette. We all lit one up and one of the first things they asked me was: “Do you want to go home with us?” Now, I don’t get asked home by three young hot Russian girls often but I was surprisingly relaxed about it. I thought that I was either getting mugged or in for great night. If you want to have fun you have to take risks, and since the whole point of the trip was to have fun, I
Morten Storm, Paul Cruickshank, Tim Lister