Face Control At The Bowling Alley

As tempting as it might be to turn this into a long story with that as the punchline, I'm just going to start with it:

We got denied admission to A BOWLING ALLEY last night for reasons of "face control." (The Russians use this English loan word -- "feis kontrol" -- to excuse their style Nazi-ism.) The security guard said it looked like we were drunk.

We had, of course, been drinking, but we were not completely drunk -- we were all pretty hungover, of course, unshaven and badly dressed and all.

And I suppose I should offer up the background information that bowling is a somewhat trendy and expensive thing to do in Russia -- usually costing $20 or $30 per hour in cleverly black-lit bowling alleys with cool music. (I ordinarily wouldn't have remotely considered paying that much to bowl, of course, but the girls we were with wanted to go.)

FACE CONTROL AT A FUCKING BOWLING ALLEY. It's a good example of what's happening to this fucking country. Next we'll have face control at McDonalds.

So in response we screamed and shouted that we knew the administrator of the company, and that we'd have them fired. (I did actually meet the president of that company once, when he was looking into English lessons for his staff, but of course I'm not going to bother the guy about something so stupid.)

The thing about these sorts of places in Russia, though -- trendy nightclubs and entertainment centers -- is that the service is almost inevitably going to be shitty, and you can't do much to complain about it, because their main function is laundering illegal money. Nobody involved cares whether the customers are happy, including, it seems the customers. . . as long as they can feel trendy.