Dispatch From the Moscow Heat
Travel Blog • Michael Yessis • 08.06.10 | 11:23 AM ET
World Hum contributor Jeffrey Tayler recently returned from Paris to his Moscow home, where soaring temperatures and wildfires have crippled the city and other parts of the country. Tayler reports from the brutal—and alcohol-soaked—scene for the Atlantic:
Another Russian saying has it that, “Heat isn’t vodka, but we feel drunk from it all the same.” Which hasn’t stopped a good number of metaphorically heat-wasted Muscovites from turning literal and tippling their way through this interminable zharishcha. I walked outside this morning to find a gang of bare-chested fellows, with shaved heads, sweaty snouts, and stretchmarked potbellies, sitting on the guardrail near our doorway, guzzling beer and smoking, and for good measure, belching and swearing about the heat. Any walk around town reveals similar scenes: men have at times dispensed with much of their clothing, and carrying a beer (plus lit cigarette) is now de rigueur. This is legal: there’s no law banning open containers of alcohol in Russia. Except that in Russia, beer hardly qualifies as alcohol. (Unless possibly it’s that 12-proof brew marked krepkoye.) Beer is more like a training beverage. But vodka is considered alcohol, and thus possesses, many would point out, curative properties for whatever ails you. So fighting noxious heat with medicinal doses of vodka makes perfect sense. And I don’t mean some dainty cocktail, like, say, a vodka collins. The idea of mixing vodka with anything except more vodka is an abomination. Why dilute the healing fun?
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Michael Yessis is the cofounder and coeditor-in-chief of World Hum.
