Most Russian women cannot imagine traveling without their husband (boyfriend) or a good friend or someone familiar. Of course, it is very special and unforgettable to travel with a beloved one. But, is taking a vacation together with someone you know a good idea?
Nowadays, I tactfully decline the offers of my Russian women friends to spend a vacation together with them as I now prefer to travel alone. I reached this conclusion after taking a travel tour around France with my girlfriend Oksana. We were good friends at our place of work but our interests on the tour proved to be completely different. I became so tired of her constant whining that the Eifel Tower is too high and the line there too long. Instead of pursuing my principal interest of roaming about Paris, Oksana was constantly attracted to shoes and souvenir items. Also, she asked me to take pictures of her at almost every spot. I eventually came to realize that if I continued to stay with Oksana I would see nothing of Paris except the expensive shops and her face through the lens of her photo camera! So I cruelly cut all the "ties" and went walking alone and that was a blast!
We Russian women come from all walks of life. So, on a group tour it is not required that we stand upon ceremony with other group members or be overly concerned with their opinions or adapt to their wishes. But if we travel with our friends in a group, we communicate with each other only and it interferes with our interaction with other people, getting new impressions and striking up new acquaintances. On a tour to France I do not want to import my Russian life and feelings into Paris. I want to get new ones.
Avoid accidental ties with other Russian women
In Rome where I traveled alone I picked up an accidental tie - and it was not good. After an organized city excursion for a large group of people, we all dispersed into different directions. But Irochka stayed with me. A smart decent Russian woman but a panic-monger: "Oh, the metro closes early"; "Oh, it is getting late, we need to go back to the hotel". It was an unfortunate situation where I could not leave her or send her back to her hotel alone. It eventually became a mini-nightmare! Without her tugging at my sleeve I would have derived far more pleasure from my Rome experience. For this reason I would leave the hotel much earlier than anyone else in order to not be caught by her tie.
What should Russian women achieve while traveling?
For sure camaraderie is not the main point in traveling. Neither is a digression to the learning of history of your travel destination as we can find all such information on the internet. The main thing for me is to feel the spirit of a city and to get to know its people. And to do this I need to penetrate into it, to sit in a non-tourist cafe, to taste the local cuisine, to amble along less traversed side streets somewhere in the off-centre of the city. Tourist information is forgotten very quickly but I will remember forever the taste of a local beer in an old Prague pub where tourists never tread!
I suggest that Russian women take a package tour, but quickly get away from the formal program and the group. As for me, shops are not my interest. I have found that tourist shops sell almost the same stuff everywhere because of globalization. Most of the Russian women in our tour group worried about free time and what to do with it. What to do and where to go? They were afraid of everything and to be alone. You can imagine how happy I was to break free from them after the daily excursions and to explore the outer reaches of the city and to immerse myself into the local culture and pace of life. | 
