Heil Hitler!

So we were at the House of Pain, as we've begun to refer to the nightclub we frequent, and as university begins this week here, it was completely full of boneheads. While at the bar getting absinthe, a bunch of particularly idiotic young Russian boys -- 18, 19 -- heard our accents and started asking us where we were from and what we were doing in Vodkaberg, etc.

I never admit to being from America to such morons -- not out of any fear of being criticized, just in the hope that they'll lose interest sooner and fuck off -- and I usually say I'm from the Czech Republic or Poland. (Flatheads of this sort wouldn't know an American accent if it shot them in the forehead.) This particular evening, I said I was from Lichtenstein, however.

Bad choice as it turned out -- they thought Lichtenstein was in Germany, and despite my efforts to explain it was between France and Belgium, they insisted on sharing their Nazi sentiments with me.

"Heil Hitler!" they kept saying.

Now I've encountered a few other Nazi-types here -- some guys at a tattoo parlor, some guys at a rock concert -- and they always say, "Heil Hitler!" -- when they answer their telephones for example.

This particular evening I was drunk enough to point out something that had been bothering me.

In my bad Russian: "And how many Russians did Hitler's army kill?"

In their slurred bad Russian: "Nye znayu!"

"20 million! 20 million dead Russians! A good start, eh! Three times the number of dead Jews!"

"Cho?" (Uneducated Russian pronunciation of 'Shto?' meaning 'What'?)

"20 million Russian dead! Heil Hitler! Heil Hitler!" I raised my glass in toast. IN english: "That your grandfathers on both sides were not killed so that your intellect could live!"

At this point my colleagues led me away. One pointed out, "Well, yeah, but Stalin killled like 25 million Russians. Maybe by comparision Hitler seemed like a good leader."

Crash

English Teacher C fell off the staircase at the nightclub the other night; he decided it might be fun to slide down the railing (after loads of beer and two absinthes) and decided it might be slide down the railing. He went over the edge, fell about twelve feet (about 3 1/2 meters to you European readers) and slammed onto the ground like a 747.

Amazingly he didn't break anything, just hurt his leg a bit.

I have a new private student who insists on feeding me several plates of pancakes at the beginning of the lesson. Yummy.

Father Figure

Boy. . . we had a night on Friday that . . . I'm not sure whether this is funny or completely nauseating. Or both. Or neither. Or just pathetic. Or who the pathetic one is.

Basically the seeds were planted the last time we went to the gay bar, the Club Rossia -- I saw a guy I was acquainted with, who introduced me to a little red head chick who somewhat resembled a younger Jennifer Garner.

I spoke to her and danced with her once, she was a bit reserved and quiet, but friendly enough, so I didn't press it; then we got kicked out for trying to take pictures.

Then, last Wednesday, we went to The nightclub-- English Teacher P (50 year old Irishman) and English Teacher C (29 year old American.) We saw the same girl. She was extremely drunk.

She came over, reeling and rocking, and asked me if I remembered her, told me how glad she was to see me, etc, and insisted I dance with her for the remainder of the evening. I, having swilled an absinthe on top of 5 or 6 beers, was more than happy to oblige, and we were making out, groping, before the end of the evening.

She wanted to stay with her two metrosexual young friends when I decided to leave at 5:00am, though. She didn't respond to the two SMS messages I sent her the next day.

Then, on Friday, we were down at the embankment drinking beer, and my telephone rang from an unidentified number. It was this girl -- Gremlin O, 20 years old -- and she wanted to see me, at a small house party she was having in her apartment, which is just down the street from mine. She was obviously drunk, and I could hear guys talking in the distance. She asked me to bring a bottle of vodka.

I ran the idea past English Teacher P and English Teacher C -- it was starting to get cold that evening, and it was still too early to go to Polet. "Obviously they just want us to buy them some vodka. . . but we could take over the place and scare everybody, probably."

They said it didn't sound like a bad idea, sitting somewhere and draining a bottle of vodka, something we haven't done too much of lately.

Well, vodka they wanted, vodka they got.

We got to her flat and it was her and two other guys and another girl. English Teacher P and English Teacher C aren't quite as sick of all those typical questions Russians want to ask foreigners as I am, and English Teacher C wants the chance to practice his Russian, so they didn't mind the attention. In point of fact there weren't the most disagreeable Russian men I've ever met. Kind of clubkid types, not flatheads.

English Teacher C had the foresight to buy some bread, salami and cheese, without which I think several of us might have been hospitalized with alcohol poisoning.

We drained one liter of Vodka within 30 minutes, and sailed through another liter by midnight. One of the Russian guys was unconscious on the bed at this point, and Gremlin O was standing on a chair yelling about how she had a big ass but small breasts, and that's how a perfect woman should be built. (in point of fact her breasts are decent handfuls.)

Somebody went out to get another half-liter of vodka, and by this point English Teacher C had taken off his shirt -- he's extremely hairy as well as extremely large -- and was letting us all line up and hit him in the stomach as hard as we could. I smashed him in the stomach about six or eight times, getting a running start on the last one, and his only response was to perhaps grunt a bit and say, "The last one was pretty good."

By this time Gremlin O was dragging me into the toilet for some making out.

Then her mother arrived.

Her mother, about 42, arrived at about 1:00am, obviously drunk, slathered with makeup, wearing a low cut blouse and a skirt. Not bad for an older woman, she was with a young man who looked to be about 25 or 26. She sat down and drained the half-liter of vodka with us, and cooked us some macaroni with vegetables. English Teacher P was, of course, quite interested to meet mama.

Gremlin O dragged me into a back bedroom and started undressing.

Her mother came to the door, "Gremlin O, be careful!"

"I will, mom!"

Mom and English Teacher P were off to the supermarket to get more vodka, it seemed.

Now of course, as often seems to happen, there were no condoms around - she of course was ready to go anyway, but I'm not stupid enough to fall for that one. After a bit of fooling around, she suddenly announced she wanted a cigarette, pulled a t-shirt on and walked out to the kitchen still wearing nothing but that. The whole crowd was assembled in the kitchen now -- English Teacher P and Mom, who were hanging all over each other to the disappointment of the 26-year-old guy, the drunken, shirtless, hairy English Teacher C, who was discussing music with the other Russian guy who also had his shirt off. The other girl and the other guy had both passed out.

"Mom, I wanted to fuck English Teacher X but he wouldn't, because he didn't have a condom." said Gremlin O (in Russian) to her mother.

Mom smiled and nodded approvingly. "Good boy. Good boy." She poured me a vodka.

"You can count on me, mom" I slurred, sitting down and draining the vodka.

It grows hazy after that. Gremlin O dragged me back to the bedroom again, rather delirious with alcohol, and challenged me to a wrestling match, which got a bit too active, and we broke something off the headboard of the bed.

English Teacher C and Gremlin O got in a disagreement about something -- he was outside smoking and she took a screwdriver, put on her boots, and announced that she was going to stick him with it.

English Teacher P and Mom were making out in the bathroom. (He told me later she'd given him a blowjob behind the 24-hour shop.)

It was about 3:00am or so by this time, and a couple of rather frightened (understandably so) neighbours came over and asked us to be quiet because they had a baby that was sleeping.

I went outside and saw Gremlin O teaching English Teacher C obscene words in Russian -- she was not especially angry, but this is her sense of humor -- so I picked her up in a fireman's carry and told her she was going to my house. (Right up the street, as I said.)

As I was walking away, English Teacher C said, "Here, don't forget the screwdriver," and handed it to me.

At my place she started crying, from sheer drunken confusion about what was going on, and I got a little huffy and said, "All right, fuck it, let's go."

But she decided she didn't want to go either. After a cigarette she calmed down.

We got in bed, and went to work.

She kept saying something in Russian that I didn't understand. Again and again. I began to understand it was some instruction. I told her I didn't understand.

She took my hands and put them around her neck.

I laughed. "Okay." I squeezed a bit.

"Harder!" she said.

I tightened my grip a bit.

She put her hands on mine and closed them until she choked and rattled.

I figured she knew what she was doing -- obviously not the first time -- but I was a little worried about waking up next to a corpse with a crushed windpipe.

"Call me a little slut," she said, in Russian.

I did so. I happen to know this particular bad word in Russian.

"Papa," she said. "Papichka." (Dear Papa.)

My cock collapsed like a dead animal, and we drifted off to sleep.

The next day she realized she'd forgotten to take her keys with her, and that her mother would be gone at work all day, and that her grandmother would be there in the afternoon, so she couldn't go home. We went to a friend of hers' flat, one of the little metrosexuals, and drank beer all afternoon. In the evening we went over to English Teacher P's flat, where he was trying to have a civilized dinner party with a girl he knew and English Teacher C and his girlfriend, who had come in from Siberia that afternoon.

The drunken, bleary, rather stinky two of us showing up didn't do much to heighten the tone of the evening, but there have been worse parties. Although Gremlin O did insist on me hanging her out the window by her legs at one point.

Too her credit, she ate all the Indian food English Teacher P cooked. Russian girls often don't like spicy foods.

On Alien Invasion

I saw WAR OF THE WORLDS -- some pretty impressive and scary scenes of mass destruction rather scuttled by one of the stupidest premises I've ever heard -- the aliens (never identified as Martians, in the film) had buried their tripod war machines underneath major cities hundreds, thousands, or (as one man suggests) millions of years ago, then activated them by zapping inside of them in little capsules.

And these things were HUGE -- in all the years, no geological survey, no mine, no archaeological excavation, no oil drilling, no radar ultrasound, no earthquake EVER REVEALED EVEN ONE, when there seemed to be hundreds of them buried all around the world? Simply retarded. And why didn't the aliens just take the Earth all those years ago, if they wanted it? And why would they get out of their war machines and get out and run around without any protective clothing whatsoever? They have the technology to make death rays, but not antibiotics? They were almost dumber than those water-allergic aliens in SIGNS.

Now INDEPENDENCE DAY was not much of a movie, but those aliens had the right idea -- vaporize major cities until the enemy surrenders, then worry about the occupation. No need to get out and run around on rooftops and bullshit like that.

Prague Ague

Just got back from 4 days in Prague (for visa reasons) -- seems even nicer than I remember -- the shopkeepers are friendlier, anyway, although maybe that's just compared to Russia. And a lot more good restaurants than there used to be. Prices are still very low, too.

A hell of a lot of drunken idiotic British though -- apparently Prague is now the "stag party" capital of Europe.

Now of course it would be easy to launch into a tiradeabout how tourism is wearing the world flat, etc, butwhat people usually mean when they say that is,"Tourism should only be allowed for people assensitive and intelligent as myself!" And what's thealternative -- completely closing all cities totourism? Leaving the great sights of the worldvisible only to the elite? No one ever offers a sensible solution when they say tourism sucks. Andit's always people who travel a lot who complain themost about tourism -- so if you don't like it, startcleaning up your own back yard. So to speak. Stay home, that way the shortcomings of tourism won't bother you in the least.

Er, unless you happen to live in a heavily touristed city.