NUISANCE IN A TOTAL LIFESTYLE EXPERIENCE

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.

Read this column in Russian in the Gazeta 24

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 make-up , 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?

Naturally, were she more active, and perhaps better educated, she would throw on a bag-pack and join her fellow Dutch adventure seekers exploring the same old Ukraine or hiking in Laos, and chances are the Russians she would meet there would provoke no complains . Young researcher Esme Visser concludes there is a growing demand for “Russian-free” tours in the West. I'd say this is hardly just about the Russians. We are all witnessing a growing number of locations on the map, especially those along the coasts, transforming into consumption spaces, tourism blending with other forms of consumption . In this process, what has become essential in mass tourism is what architect George Katodrytis called the dose of familiarization, of the anticipated. The new is all the more attractive to the consumer, the closer it overlaps with the consumer's anticipations ( and the less it represents the reality ). It is the comfort ( the way each nation defines it ) that matters for an all-inclusive resort client, much more than the historical or architectural authenticity or the encounters with strange cultures. Resort tourists anticipate a week or two in a cocoon – the air-conditioned bus, the four or five star hotel, the restaurant with a European buffet. Today, one can eat, sleep and party in an almost identical context in almost any country. The Russians have ordered their context and their tour operators promised to provide it, but the Dutch have ordered a different experience in the same location. A package tour is expected to be a total lifestyle experience, it is expected to fulfil a dream. For the Dutch and the Russian tourists to stop popping up as unexpected nuisances in each other's dreams they should at least try to begin speaking to each other and load each other in their mutual anticipation “programmes”.