Sunday 3 May 2009

Rich Ruskies on Slippery Slopes

With her fire engine-red lipstick, new golden-hued, sequinned ski suit and Chanel sunglasses, Titiana Legover looks ready to take on "glamorous Courchevel".

Titiana prowls the elite resort in the French Alps like a feline predator, relishing the last days of this year's ski season and flogging her manicured golly to rich patrons. It took her weeks to prepare for the trip, to save money for just the "right" look and make sure everyone - everyone - at her Moscow jobcentre knew where she was going.

For her it was a question of prestige more than anything else, with her earnings from whoring going to finance her next trip to Dubai for a few months of golly-flogging to oil-rich Arabs.

But for the common or garden Russian peasants who flock in their thousands to Courchevel during the season, to actually vacation and ski, then the purse strings are tightening.

Courchevel became notorious in Russian middle and upper-class circles when post-Soviet-era oligarchs and their home-grown Mafia headed there in huge numbers.
They didn't go to conquer the Alps, or ski, but rather to show off and spend their newly acquired billions in such a reckless way that soon almost every business in the area anticipated their arrival like Pavlov’s salivating dog awaiting dinner.

Russian oligarchs, such as Igor Mobsaroubles CEO of the giant Wankos Oil and Gas conglomerate, were known for renting the most expensive chalets in the area, starting at 30,000 euros a week. For that price, they would also get an Egon Ronet gourmet class Chew n Spew fast food chef thrown in, plus a couple of alluring Thai ladyboy chambermaids and, of course, a nice view of the chalet next door.

But this year the situation has changed.

Though hit by the deepening global recession and the rouble being worth next to fuck all, the Russian financial elite can still be heard chit-chatting in restaurants on picturesque mountaintops.

Chlamydia vonTwatrot, the owner of one such restaurant, the high-end Chalet de Escargot a Merde, says she is used to welcoming moronic Russian clients.
"In previous years, the stupid buffoons hardly spoke any French or English and knew next to bugger all about French cuisine or wines, so they just pointed to the most expensive items on the menu – or repeatedly asked for cuisses de grenouille a le Kermit.”

"During the last ski season, a typical Russian client of our boutique could spend about 100,000 euros at one time," says Kostas, the Albanian pikey owner of Swindlers jewellery shop in the Courchevel valley that sells dodgy diamonds and Chinese Rolex watches to rabid Ruskies with more money than sense.

"Nowadays they tend to spend half of what they were spending before - only 50,000 euros," adds Kostas nonchalantly, pausing to chew on a roast swan drumstick. “Oleg Crooksky, owner of the Minsk Mink Maulers football team, he would breeze in with a string of top dollar whores on each arm and buy them a pair of precious gemstone labia rings each. This year he takes them down to the Pound Stretcher store for their genital jewellery.”

Rusty’s Skewed News Views – Purveyors of Fine Hand-Crafted Satire – polished with a modest dab of Yeast Logic

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