Tony Brenton, the UK ambassador in Russia, invited 25 hand-selected Russian bloggers for a lunch few days ago, and 10 came. The bloggers say that nothing of substance was discussed, but noted that Gazpacho Andalouse and Shrimp Risotto of adequate quality were served. No one asked wtf British Government is doing suggesting to change the Constitution during the lunch. Below are the pictures from the event. Note how British Embassy bothered enough to map nick names to real names (map of the table seatings with names), but did not get far enough to get the names in Cyrillic; on blogs, few commented that waitresses do not look too happy on the pictures; to be fair, bloggers do neither.
Photos
Must be a British charm offensive.
The real clash of civilisations, maybe.
PS - were you invited? And present? In the long run, we're all dead. John Maynard Keynes
I got the same impression that neither side was sure what they were together for.
No, I'm not a blogger, just an occasional commenter. The ones invited were "tysyachneki" - mostly people on the Russian side of livejournal.com with at least of 1 thousand registered readers, half of them are journalists, the rest mostly writers and political consultants.
