Sovok of the Week

As I was afraid, the West finally got me and I couldn’t get away unscathed from it. This time I am talking about a fiasco of a wedding that I was planning with an American woman. Life goes on, however, and I’ve been casting my love nets into the murky sea of online dating. And here is an email that I got (spelling and punctuation preserved):

“When I have seen yours profile I didnt have words. I thought that there is not such man in the world. Now I sit and think about that to write you. I dont know what to tell. If you wish to see my photos, then I can send it to you. I would like to learn you better because you have liked me. If you have some questions then you can write to me on “XXXX” at “yahoo” dot c o m. I with pleasure will answer you. To my mind you receive a lot of letters from girls like me, but I ask you to pay attention to my letter and I hope that tomorrow I shall receive your message. If I am not interesting to you that tell it to me. I will be upset, but I shall not write you more and I hope that you will find happiness.

Will you write me? Really?

I wait ……

Dreaming about such as U.”

Any wide-eyed Westerner would become immediately giddy after receiving such a message but not me. As a shrewd Sovok, I immediately smelled something rotten. First of all, this lovebird claimed to be from North Dakota and her profile stated “I love the clean air, beautiful landscapes, and the down to earth people but the rainy winters are pretty brutal.” Wait a minute. North Dakota has rainy winters? Tell me more! After a quick search on Google, I found out that this sentence was lifted, as was expected, from some other lonesome person’s profile in Kentucky. Besides, the grammar of the letter left no doubt that I was dealing with some Slav trying to dupe some naive Westerner into helping out with some “medical expenses for a sickly grandma” or some other similar nonsense. In fact, chances are that the email was written by some mustachioed man from Kazan by the name Igor (see picture on the right).

I was planning on developing this romance into a full-blown story for “Sovok of the Week”, but I made a huge and unforgivable mistake. After making some small talk in my reply, I signed it with my real name. Now, imagine Igor receiving a reply from a guy with a Russian name. The jig was up and he simply could not win against another Slav.

I think I was right. I never heard from the spell-bound beauty again.

So, here we go. The West screws the East. The East tries to screw the West. The East realizes that it can’t screw its own. History of the last 1000 years in a nutshell.

DJ VadimJ