Montreal
Salsero in Russia - August, 2007
By:
In
August 2007, Montreal’s SalsaPower correspondent and salsero,
Faruk Patel, took a vacation to distant Russia and a few surrounding
countries including Finland, Estonia and Latvia.
This two and a half week trip was planned to mix tourist sight-seeing
with salsa dancing in this region of the world, ending with attending
the Riga Salsa Festival 2007 in Latvia.
Tourism
and sight seeing
Whereas Russia has many great tourist sites to visit, it is unfortunately
not tourist friendly. The trip started with difficulties including
a 2 hour line-up at Moscow airport’s passport control, followed
by luggage being delayed in London, England which led to us having
to wait in more lines and try to fill out paperwork entirely in Russian.
Luckily our Russian host and good friend was there to rescue me and
my travel companion, Carl.
Getting around was tricky as the taxis would tend to rip off tourists
and the subways were entirely in the Russian Cyrillic alphabet which
looks like this: 
Nonetheless,
with a good tour book with bilingual maps, it’s possible to
get around.
The
sightseeing highlights included the Kremlin & Red Square in Moscow,
the Hermitage and Peterhof palace in St. Petersburg, not to mention
the very colorful cathedrals in both cities.
The
People
One observation that I made was that although the Russian people appeared
cold on the outside, they turned out to be surprisingly warm and friendly
when we got to know them a bit better. The elder Russians (perhaps
from the time of USSR) didn’t speak much English and were more
aloof than the new generation of Russians who were friendly and often
spoke English.
Moscow surprisingly had a high proportion of women versus men and
many of them were very attractive. This was our observation and then
our host, Dimitriy, explained that this was indeed true as apparently
beautiful women from all over Russia gathered in Moscow to find a
rich husband.
Salsa
clubs and ‘face control’
My friends and I went to a few salsa clubs in Moscow and St. Petersburg.
It was nice to see salsa even in this country. They danced primarily
Cuban style versus New York style and so when I appeared there dancing
New York style very few partners were able to follow comfortably.
‘Face control’ is a concept I had never heard of until
visiting Russia. Essentially when people go to regular clubs, the
club has the right to refuse people entrance – without any reason
or just by looking at your face. My friends and I tried to enter one
swanky club only to be refused with no reason. We then went to another
club, Raii, and luckily my friend knew a bouncer and we were allowed
entrance. This turned out to be a very exhilarating night as we witnessed
sights beyond even the Montreal club scene!
Finland,
Estonia & Latvia
After 10 days in Russia, we went to Helsinki, Finland and visited
Suomenlinna, Finland’s fortress island & a world heritage
site. While in the city we also met up with Helsinki’s SalsaPower
correspondent, Pontus Flink, who was very helpful with salsa information
and was the one who informed me how there were no salsa events during
the few days I was in town.
The
next city we visited was Tallinn, the capital of Estonia. A small
city which had much of it’s old town in great shape. I recommend
visiting it. After 2 short days here we moved on to our final destination
– Riga, the capital of Latvia. I had timed the trip around visiting
this city at the same time as the Riga Salsa Festival 2007. The event
was fantastic!
The
next trip is being planned already. I’m organizing a group of
us to go to the Madrid Salsa Congress starting on March 20, 2008.
Five days in Madrid and then 5 days in Barcelona ...this should also
be a blast!
