Russian Travel

Here’s an entertaining and slightly racist article from the British News Telegraph. Anyway, it delivers a different (not quite truthful) perspective:

After decades fighting the British for places on the sun lounger, the Germans have a new holiday enemy - armies of Russians competing for their favorite destinations.

Lured by all-inclusive deals offering flights and accommodation for as little as �140 a fortnight, millions are turning up at Turkish and Egyptian resorts once considered to be firmly in German hands.

In a number of unflattering articles in Germany, the average family from Moscow has been depicted as rough, nouveau riche peasants who steal the carpet from beneath their hotel beds, start camp fires beside hotel pools, and - worst of all - encourage their children to steal boiled eggs from the breakfast buffet.

"Their women look like tarts, the blokes are common as dirt - even worse than the English in Mallorca," one German tourist in Hurghada, on the Red Sea, told a German newspaper.

A doctor, Gregor Breivogel, staying at the same resort, said: "The Russians are the worst plague. They have no manners and they drink and bellow all day."

Equally galling was the admission by one German woman tourist holidaying in Kemer, on Turkey's Mediterranean coast, that in the battle for the lounger, Russians seem to have beaten the Germans at their own game. "I have to get to the beach early before the Russians snatch all the sunbeds," she said.

Her infuriated husband said: "Even if you put a towel and all your stuff on the sunbed, the Russians just clear it off. They have no respect for anything."

One magazine gave a detailed description of the average Russian male tourist, whom it said was built like a Soviet T34 tank. "He has arms like a wrestler and legs like the chimney on a Taiga cabin stove. He drinks in the morning, smokes everywhere and never says sorry," it said. The magazine added: "His wife, Olga, looks like a Red Army soldier drawn from a film about the Cold War."

The influx of Russian spending power has led to local boutiques that used to sell beachwear also stocking expensive furs and winter coats aimed at the rouble.

Germans are also dismayed that although they still triumph in tourist beauty contests, Ivans and Sergeis increasingly walk off with the prizes in the jet ski, paragliding and crazy golf events.

With up to 1.5 million Russians visiting Turkey last year and 500,000 going to Egypt, Germans are already outnumbered in most resorts.

The prospect of a further decline in Russo-German beach relations prompted Neckermann, one of Germany's largest tour operators, to call for the nationalities to be kept apart. Gunther Tr�ger, a spokesman for Neckermann, said: "There would be Russian hotels and hotels for other nationalities, especially at the middle and lower ends of the market."