MAIL ORDER BRIDES socials in Moscow
The men are well off, if not wealthy, and are pilots, engineers, professors, lawyers. For the first mail order brides 'social', they arrive in their Sunday best carrying photographs of pools, Porsches and houses that look like palaces to most Russians. The women teeter in looking like a collection of exotic Barbie dolls in miniskirts, cut-away shoulders and frou-frou. A few struggle to find a bit of fabric on which to fasten their name-tags. Some of them are also teachers and engineers - but much younger, much more attractive and much, much, much poorer than their potential swains.
Mail order brides at Cosmos Hotel
The horseshoe-shaped 26-storey Cosmos Hotel was built during the Cold War for the 1980 Olympics. Now, in one of its long meeting rooms, it is easy to see who won that war. The men sit at tables covered in white tablecloths - interpreters by their sides - surveying the mail order brides. If they see one they like, they call her over for a chat and a phone number. The women walk between the tables or sit at the sides - a sexy line of wallflowers who whisper to each other while their eyes keep on working the room. There is history at work here. Russian men are dying younger, drinking harder and are as demanding as ever. In the West, meanwhile, women are living longer and getting pickier as equality becomes more of a reality. The result is that Russian women are said to be the fastest-growing segment on the international mail order brides dating scene. The stereotype mail order bride is a dirt-poor Filipina with a flower behind one ear and little else (including much of an education) to call her own.
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