The Hard Way
The big downside of driving to Kaliningrad is your all-too-obvious foreign plated car. It’s an open invitation to be Ripped By Russians.A girl told me the other day that her grandfather was sent to the gulag simply for knowing foreign languages. This ingrained Stalinist mentality still permeates the Kaliningrad ‘hospitality industry’. You don’t really get a bill as a foreigner anywhere, it’s more of a fine. Or a ’straf’ as the Kaliningrad militsi call their brand of tourist shakedown.
I stopped for a roadside lunch outside Svetlogorsk yesterday. When I got the fine, I noticed 10% had been added to every single shout: glass of wine, cup of coffee, dessert, blah.‘What’s all this then?’ I asked the hostess. ‘Oh, it’s a local tax.’ Yeah right. Local to her front door.The funny part is that Russians don’t have a clue about ‘word of badmouth’. According to customer service research, a dissatisfied customer complains to an average of eight other people about a bad experience. In the blogging era, you can probably put the figure nearer eighty.
I didn’t mind the cuisine being inept. You expect that in Russia. ‘Do you want cheese on your steak?’ asked the proprietress. ‘Certainly not’. ‘Oh’, she said. ‘It won’t be very nice without cheese’. Well, she was right about that.
For some reason this reminds me of an old joke about the tourist slogan of another Eastern European country once known for its involvement in the European car-theft, er, industry:
“Come to Yugoslavia — your car is already there!”
C-Dude: Did you change your feed or something? I haven’t seen anything from you in ages. I thought you might have been stabbed by stiletto. Only saw this post because of Wu Wei.
[...] writes about various ways of mistreating foreigners in Russia - and about “word of badmouth,” [...]