What I Learned About Russian Nightclubs
This past Friday marked my first Russian class, not meaning the Russians in the class that I will be teaching (that still has yet to happen, although I am doing some observations today), but the classes I will be taking to improve my Russian so that I can hopefully communicate at a somewhat basic level by the end of my stay here in Russia (my goal, not theirs). Either way, I went to class, and besides being surprised at my ability to understand a good deal of what was going on, I pleasantly discovered that my classmates are wonderful human beings. So wonderful, in fact that when they invited me out that very night, I went.
Things started off relatively simply: beer, and a French drinking game that involved one putting one’s cap upside down on their bottle and the other trying to throw their cap at it and knock it off. If your cap gets knocked off, you drink (simple enough). This social excursion also gave me the opportunity to drink some Tomskian beer, and although I cannot remember the name at the moment (it was relatively long and not an easy word to memorize) I am positive that I will drink it again, being that it was extremely delicious.
After a few beers and some conversation, it was decided that we should go to a nightclub, and I decided it would be a good idea to tag along because
1. I was slightly inebriated
2. Everyone else was going
3. I most certainly like dancing
4. The opportunity to experience ‘authentic’ Russian nightlife, or at least what that amounted to in Tomsk
Again, for some reason I forgot to remember the name of the club (I don’t even remember looking at the sign) but upon entering, it was like walking into a stereotype: lasers, purple lights, girls in small tops who are hired to dance to get the boys to dance, loud techno music that was essentially the same thing over and over again, and bartenders with sweet bottle tossing moves. What struck me as different right off the bat was the presence of a stage, upon which scantily clad women danced in various costumes. It was even choreographed. As my eyes slowly adjusted to the somewhat epilepsy-inducing lights at the club I slowly came to the realization of something else, something that I would otherwise never expect to see in a club unless it was labeled specifically as a club that specialized in such practice. In short, there were boobies everywhere.
I first noticed this once I looked past the bar tenders and saw a small pit in which a young blonde woman was dancing, thinking nothing of it, I continued to order my drink at the bar when suddenly in my peripheral vision I saw her remove her top. For about three seconds I couldn’t say anything, thinking that somehow these new acquaintances of mine had somehow lured me into a stripclub as a practical joke, thinking it were funny. Upon asking one of the local attendees if this was a normal club, he replied that it was, meaning that it’s somewhat expected that, or at least not atypical for certain nightclubs feature partially nude women, and that essentially is what the cover charge is for. Later, on the stage, a woman performed something that was nothing short of a striptease, even grabbing a person from the audience (I’m sure he was a plant).
Nonetheless, this experience was completely new to me, especially considering that I had sort of made it a personal goal of mine to never enter a strip club unless for a very constructive and specific reason (criteria purposefully hard to meet). Now I feel as if I can no longer make that claim. Apparently that has all changed now, and by going to a Russian club I killed two birds with one stone
