First trip to a Russian dacha

For those of you who don’t know, a Russian dacha is like a summer house. A lot of Muscovites have dachas, although the standard varies from ivory palace to wooden hut.

Now I first went to a real Russian dacha a bit late in the game, about three years late to be exact, but before then I was simply never invited, presumably because I was always too busy surfing the web for filth...

I was pleased to finally be going and interested to see whether my theory was correct (my theory was that younger Russians go there to get trashed, following which a kind of weird orgy ensues that involves girl swapping and high-fiving galore) I was wrong about the latter, although I’m sure it goes on...

I went there by electrichka with six other Russians, two of which were guys (love Russian ratios) and when we finally got there after two hours I could see I was in for the real wooden-hut deal. I’m talking wooden out house – the works.

We started drinking right away – vodka shots with various birthday toasts (It was the hosts birthday), my stomach was fairly empty and it was dark out already, but I couldn’t be seen as the English pussy. After this we moved inside and started playing a drinking game called quipse. I can’t remember the rules exactly but it involves throwing a dice, checking the total and then trying to deceive the person next to you, if you deceived them then they do a shot, if not, you do a shot.

A combination of being new to the game and sucking at math meant I was doing a lot of drinking. I happily moved from buzzed, sailed past my happy drunk ‘limit’ (the point where you know you should go no further) and rolled straight into trashed. Did some dancing, played a game of twister and somewhere around 5am went to bed.

Although, even through my drunken haze I had managed to score some action half confirming my belief about the true nature of dacha parties.

I woke up in the morning after being molested all night by mosquitoes and had one of the, if not the, worst hangover to date (as of 2012, this still holds true). All day I was hovering between headache, fatigue and wondering whether or not I’d be sick. To make matters worse there was no more water and no proper food (we ended up eating shashliks at 11pm that night).

We were sat around outside and I started getting the sick feeling, you know, where you keep swallowing over and over again. I was being blasted with questions on English culture and could only muster yes and no answers. Now I couldn’t be sick in the toilet because the toilet was a wooden outhouse and I didn’t want my head over a wooden hole of was essentially raw human faeces. 

I needed another plan and plus they would all here me puking if I went to the wooden toilet hole. I remembered that upstairs, on the second floor there was a window that opened out onto the back roof of the dacha. I excused myself calmly, floated quietly upstairs and let rip on the back of the house. Everything went according to plan, I came back down, felt better and they were none the wiser. Later it rained and my shameful act was washed away.

They started drinking again in the afternoon but I was KOd for the weekend. I ended up back in Moscow on Monday morning. I was tired, all bitten to hell but had a pretty unique time down at the dacha which I’m glad I experienced.