I think he made eye contact with me, which makes it worse

Happy birthday, Grampa. Don't read this post.

Much as Good-Ol'-Abe and I joke (quite frequently) about dragging Wer of Wer&Wif fame to a strip club for his bachelor party, I very much do not want to. Not just because I swore up, down, and sideways to Wif that I wouldn't.

I've never set foot in a strip club, although, truth be told, that admission doesn't shame me; my mental construct of "strip club" doesn't have any connotations of "forbidden fruit," just as I'm really quite fine with having restricted access to highly radioactive areas, warzones, and any area where mass amounts of bodily fluids may possibly erupt at any moment, areas where a warning sign lets you know when you're crossing the threshold. Perhaps if there were hazmat suits at the door...

I've never set foot in a strip club, but I've heard the rules: placing a dollar bill in specific areas is the most exciting anything can get. Otherwise, it's look but don't touch.

We'll come back to strip clubs. First a word on PDA in Russia.

It's amateur foreigners who look at people holding hands or hugging or making out or even getting to second base in public. That's just gonna happen, and the sense of what is acceptable in public spaces is much different. And even though I think photography here is weird, it doesn't creep me out.

Even I have my limits, though. I just hope that if I were to bring it up to one of my Russian friends they would also find it disturbing - I'm not sure. This is the deal - when I'm sitting in a cafe and notice that a woman's sprawled in a much older man's lap, and that she is clutching him and kissing his lips and his neck like he's an Orthodox ikon of some creepy looking Virgin Mary holding a deformed sweet&sour and she's a scary Russian babushka, and he makes no attempt to touch her or to kiss her back or to show any emotion: not hate, not love, not fear, annoyance, stress, not NOTHING -- that's when I get creeped out by Russian PDA.

Because then it's "look but don't touch." Then he's transformed his girlfriend into a sex object, as something for all the world to see that he's bought, not that he cares for. And then I feel like I somehow missed the warning sign...