when she was dressed we went back inside and I was introduced to the whole family. The groom was a biker and all his biker buddies came over on their motorcycles. Luckily I found out that one of the bridesmaids (Natalia) spoke perfect English and I talked with her for a while.
In the afternoon we went to a park where the couple had the pictures taken. There was a lot of food and people started drinking vodka. Welcome to Russia. I had at least five double shots of vodka before we moved on. There was a whole truckload of hot girls there, but unfortunately most of them didn’t speak English. Still, when we drove to a small church for more pictures I ended up in a large SUV with the hottest girls from the wedding crowd. We were sitting in the back of the car and suddenly the girls opened the small rooftop and stood up and started shouting and cheering like something out of the movies. I just sat there with the two finest asses a man could ever see waving in my face. I took a sneaky picture, because my friends back home would never believe me if I told them about this.
Later that night we all went to the wedding party where I kind of felt like a wedding crasher. But still, most people seemed to like it that I was there: at one point people almost stood in a line to toast with the foreigner. I was downing so many vodka shots that I had to switch to champagne so that I wouldn’t get completely wasted. I danced with some girls and Sergei did half a drunken striptease. I got the feeling that Sergei was the disreputable uncle of the family, the one his brothers and sisters probably warned their kids about. I still found it almost unbelievable I was just attending a Russian wedding in the countryside like it was something perfectly natural.
I got talking with one of the bikers who had studied English once, and after the wedding he and a few other bikers drove me to a garage in some back alley. It all looked pretty dodgy but once inside they showed me their bikes and we drank some beers. After a while we smoked weed.
They had some sort of weed oil that they smoked with a sawed off plastic bottle and a bucket of water. I had never used that sort of bong before. Needless to say, after all that vodka and champagne and now this, I was pretty fucked up that day. Afterwards three of the rough bikers brought me home in a car and walked me all the way to the door of my apartment. At first it looked a bit sketchy when they walked up the stairs with me but they were just being nice and making sure I got indoors alright. Just as well, too. Russian people hardly ever smile but are among the nicest, friendliest people I met around the world.
I had a massive hangover the next morning but Natalia and a lot of young people from the wedding picked me up anyway, and we went with four or five cars to some lake a few hours away. It was still very hot outside. We all lay on the beach that day, eating leftover food from the wedding and drinking vodka again. (Welcome to Russia.) I made a sorry attempt to score with one of the girls but no success – I really wasn’t in any state to carry it off anyway. Natalia was watching from a distance and acted like she didn’t mind, but to this day she asks me to return to Russia and hang out with her. And one day I will and who knows what will happen then.
Russia (Far East) – Khabarovsk
After the wedding in Chita I spent two nights on the train to reach Khabarovsk, the second-largest city in Russia’s Far East. When I got off the train I dropped my bag in a locker and started exploring the city. It was hot outside and I walked around the city most of the afternoon. The first thing I noticed was the extremely high number of hot girls in the city. Having already been in Russia for already six weeks I was getting used to seeing quite a lot of attractive girls around but here it was unreal. Out of every ten girls you saw at least seven or eight were highly bangable. Almost every girl was at least a 7 on a scale