Radioactive Stag

Apparently, there is an increasing number of people who have their bachelor/bachelorette parties in the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone. You read that correctly. Cheap flights, the opening up of the area to tourism, and just general morbid curiosity have created a strange new ritual for stag parties. And mind you, when you go here, you can't drink. There are no strippers or prostitutes. There is a hotel, but beyond that, the whole thing is just a matter of wandering through an abandoned, possibly dangerous city that could maybe make you radioactive.

Then again, I guess that's the point.

Stag parties have always been about getting all the single-life hellion out of your system so you can settle down.  Of course, as we've become a more open society where sex and pleasure are concerned, perhaps we don't need to 'get it out of our system' as much as we used to. For many people these days, the point of getting married is as a nice safe exit out of the party life. When you start that in your teens and don't marry until your 30s, the whole party thing has started to get dull.

Instead, it seems some people want to spend their last days as a single person exploring something else. This isn't just a collection of abandoned buildings. This is a relic of Soviet-era life. It's a relic of the nuclear arms race. What do people talk about as they walk through abandoned buildings? What do they discuss when there is no background noise or energy from other people? What do you do with all of that spookiness, all of that sadness?

A lot of people probably find this morbid or disrespectful. I can understand this. At the same time, I do really get why people would go there, especially when their lives are about to change.