praca w Europie

Nuisance in a total lifestyle
experience
By Sophia Sophia Kornienko
Kornienko
There was a party held in the garden of our hotel, with a buffet and a lamb on the
barbecue. A Russian took almost the whole lamb to share with his friends and there was
nothing left for the rest of us.
Groningen University student Esme Visser has collected several hundred of similar
quotes on the Dutch travel fora and interviewed another several hundred on site in Turkey,
visited by one and a half million Russians in 2006 alone. This month Visser is publishing her
thesis on the stereotypes that the Dutch share about “the Russians”, as pretty much all former
Soviets are referred to here. Visser specializes in Eastern European Studies, but her
knowledge of the Russians does not only come from books – as a teenager she spent two years
living in Kiev with her parents and, she confesses, once brought a whole suitcase of
stereotypes back to Holland herself. In her study, however, it was pure statistics that she was
interested in, and that statistics did not turn out flattering for the Russians. According to the
data Visser collected, 80 percent of the travel reviews mentioning Russians are negative. One
would say that those placing their reviews on the internet fora usually do so to complain to
their heart's content and rarely to praise their tour operator, but take this : none of the other
nationalities one comes across on a package tour has been so much complained about as the
Russians. The “Russians”, that is.
The first problem about the Russians is that you can't communicate with them. Most
Russian tourists that arrive in Egypt for a week of all-inclusive sun don't speak a word of
English. Of course, there remains the possibility to use body language instead, but there you
have the second problem: Russians don't have the same body language, the main difference
being that they don't smile for nothing.
They do smile and even laugh when something is funny or when they are happy to see
a friend, but smiling at a stranger is considered suspicious. That is one of the reasons why
Westerners, to whom smiling is simply being polite; often consider Russians to be
discourteous and ungrateful for the services they get. Dutch women seem to be more
displeased with the Russians than Dutch men.
When on vacation, Russian women flirt with everyone around them while their
husbands load up the vodka, they complain. Russian women are suffering from the lack of
attention from their spouses, that's why (even when on vacation!) they wear heels and makeup
, and don't hesitate to venture for the bar wearing nothing but a string bikini. Has the
Dutch woman come to the resort to be witnessing this?
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