For two weeks I’ve been travelling with two moai statues. The first head I’ve named Little Steve.

After a day he complained about being lonely so I returned to the market and bought him a friend.

Meet Big Steve. He is made of stone and is a bit inconvenient to travel with. Last week I rested him on the ledge of the top bunk to be funny but he fell when the maid was making my bed and nearly killed her. Good thing she has a sense of humor! Since then I put him on my pillow and she never fails to tuck him in.

Signs that you are __________ while travelling…

CONTINUED FROM PART 1…

Guys get laid by either mostly luck or mostly skill. It’s luck if you switch yourself with another random guy and sex would still occur. That means you got the girl at the right moment. There is nothing wrong with that but you will you be unable to consciously duplicate your effort. Otherwise, you did something that created attraction and sexual desire and it was only you she wanted. And then you try again the next night, with a better than average chance of succeeding.

The gringos I’ve met that have a sex story got it by luck, plain and simple. Only one Israeli guy has been the exception. I wish not so I could learn some new things but the typical story is a gringo goes to a bar, a horny 5 or 6 approaches him, and he goes with it and gets some if her bedroom is far enough from her parents room or if he finds a hotel that doesn’t mind a couple without luggage. Only here have I heard “…and then she just kissed me.” If you are so oblivious to a girl’s attraction to you that she has to make the big move then I know you’re struggling for girls back at home and that’s the reason why you enjoy traveling through third world countries so much.

Standing with the three very pretty Argentine girls next to my hostel door, I knew I couldn’t get any further. After nearly four hours with them, I accepted defeat and settled for green light’s phone number. Then, to validate the confusion and ambiguity I’ve been trying to explain to you, the sister asks me for my cell phone number. Whatever, this old man needed sleep. How do these people have so much energy? The next day I seek out the Argentines working at the hostel to explain to me what the deal is, but they are as confused as I was. With two more months here I’ll have time to figure things out on my own.

Two days later she responds to my text message a typical twenty minutes after I sent it. I hate text messaging more than anyone but the definition of awkward would be me talking in Spanish on the telephone. She! used! a! lot! of! exclamation! points!!! but I loved it. I like chasing girls and putting in work from start to finish, much more than a random club make-out that ends once the cab drives away. I’m sweating bullets trying to translate my game into Spanish but with the hostel chef’s help the messages are going and coming. If it’s not difficult and doesn’t have an awesome payoff, it wouldn’t even be worth thinking about.

I was hanging outside on the sidewalk with a Canadian who was digging into some watermelon. Right by us walks a girl in gym clothes, as close to Western perfection as you can get, more attractive than any female I’d see back at home in half a year. But there are no hoots and hollers, no obvious stares. She is very beautiful, but she’s not rare here, and at night the club will be full of girls like her. Yeah, it’ll be hard to leave, but harder not to come back.

If you Google “Argentina models” (or just “models”), you will see nothing better than what I see every day and night. It’s a parade of beautiful girls. As one guy told me, “It’s like they’ve discovered how to engineer hot girls here.” I’ve become so desensitized to it that the only girls I notice are the ones who really stand out—the ugly ones. It’s so brutal to be unattractive here that moving to Chile or the United States would be your only option.

Having a round, proportional ass is such a given that there is no need for me to check them out anymore. But I look anyway to see how nice it is. You know those cheesy beer commercials with the party of very pretty girls? It’s better than that. Very few girls are overweight and all of them—even the tomboys—have long long hair. The only women that have hair shorter than me are the rocker wannabes or women over 40, but even that is rare because apparently older women here believe is still looking like a woman. Maybe I’m overhyping things but it really is that much better than back home. When you ask someone how long they’ve been in town, the answer is usually three days. Here in Cordoba, Argentina I’ve gotten several answers approaching two months, and chances are you’ve never heard of Cordoba. Es increible.

Still, many have complained about how “tough” Argentine girls are, but I wonder if that is just beta-speak for, “They don’t approach me like the girls in Peru.” The girls here will not encourage you, will never approach, will not make any sort of eye contact, and will do everything in their power to make it seem like they don’t want to know you. It’s so bad that I’m confident the word unapproachable came from Argentina. But it’s just a front. Once you crack it, and it’s really not that difficult, you are home sweet home.

In Chile I was advised by a native in a club bathroom (not in a stall) to dump my bad Spanish and just open in English to be even more different and exotic. I go up to a group and say something in English or just, “You guys speak English, yes?” It opens better than anything else I’ve tried. In Argentina, depending on the club, it takes only a few approaches to get “in” with a group. It’s the same amount of work you’d have to put in a U.S. megaclub, but unlike the U.S. there are no morbidly obese or warpigs in the group. They’re all good. I tell the gameless gringos I meet here that that’s all they gotta do is speak English but even while drunk they are too scared to approach. They just stand there, getting drunk alone while bobbing their head to house music I know they don’t like, whining about how they can’t wait to get to Brazil. I often have to ditch them in the club because they just fuck things up.

On Saturday night I went to a club called Dorian Gray that surprisingly wasn’t gay. I started talking to three 8′s. Two of them were fraternal twins, with hair almost touching their ass, and all had bodies that would break my buddies necks back at home. I wished I brought my camera. It is very difficult for any reasonable man to choose between the three. While the problem is other countries is “Can I do better?”; the problem here is “Which one do I pick?”

Girls usually go out in large packs so the biggest problem is indeed the picking. When all of them are giving you an equal vibe and they are all on the same level, it’s hard to make a wise decision. If you pick poorly then it will be all for nothing because not only will the girl who liked you go cold because you didn’t pick her, but her friend will too since she knows her friend liked you. Argentine girls are too proud to be second best. So right now I’ve adopted a mediocre, passive strategy of not picking. I make progress on the group and just wait until one of them gives me a green light. Sometimes the green light comes late, but it always comes. With four girls iin Salta I didn’t know what was going on until one of them asked me to sit with her in the front of the cab at the end of the night. It’s so ambiguous that I’ve seriously contemplated just asking “So which one of you likes me the most?”

The club closed at 6AM so we hopped in a cab to the after-hours club called “The Poor Devil.” They wouldn’t let me pay the cab fare. Finally, after almost three hours, the green light comes: one of them grabs my hand and walks me to the bar. BOOYAKASHA! She buys me a drink and refuses to let me pay for it. And I do mean refuse—I picked up her to physically move her away from the bar but she still insisted. She’s a 22-year-old student. That sort of thing never happens to me at home. Maybe this is how Argentine girls are tough?

They walked me back to my hostel a few blocks away, but then the two other girls started hovering like helicopters. Isolate or die, or as a buddy of mine used to say, divide and conquer. Now the other sister is on me talking to me about hanging out. Are they just being friendly? But I’ve never held hands with a lady friend before. And why did she keep asking me how long I was staying in town? The sun is out now and I’m so exhausted I can’t think. Green light still looks good in the light. It’s 7AM but on the streets instead of seeing professionals in suits or storekeepers tending shop you got dozens of drunk guys singing and running on the streets playfully hitting on the girls milling around. It was bizarre.

CONTINUED…

The last place I want a cute Irish girl into me is in a club in Argentina. It was a weekend night and we were the only two from our hostel that went out. Since she was a drinker, hooking up would be as certain as a Chilean from Santiago eating a hot dog piled disgustingly high with mayonnaise and a mix of other condiments that even an American wouldn’t touch.

I didn’t want to pull the trigger too soon because the girls in the club were nicer. Do you go for the sure thing or roll the dice and risk a silent jerk in the bottom bunk underneath some guy from New Zealand? I couldn’t decide so I did the lean against the wall thing where she danced in front of me. I don’t know if you have seen an Irish girl dance to house or reggaeton, but it was quite embarrassing—for me! I kept my options open.

About one hour in, she asked if I could hold her coat while she goes on the main dance floor. I said no and placed it on the floor. She said, “If you want to find me, you’ll find me,” and did a little head flick and off she went. I laughed at this attempt at game and started talking to the three Argentine girls next to me. They were extremely nice since they saw me with the Irish girl, who came back in four minutes, maybe three. She made it seem like she’d be gone for such a long time that reuniting with her would be on par with winning a rigged carnival game.

It’s around now she makes a very strong effort on this here, but I wasn’t surprised because she earlier admitted she likes “Persian guys.” I find it amusing how there’s a significant number of white girls with no body hair or pigment who have a type that can be best described as “hairy beast.” Something about diversifying the gene pool I guess.

This isn’t about what happened that night, but what happened a day later. The Irish girl makes friends with a Scottish bird and they tried to get me to come out. I declined because I was leaving the next morning. The Irish girl said, “Oh come on it’ll be fun.” She looked at the Scottish girl and continued, “We went out to this club last night and I gave him my coat and got lost and danced all night long.” That would be like me saying, “I fucked two supermodels in the bathroom and it was grand. They didn’t want me to use a condom so I didn’t and I don’t regret it one bit.”

She wasn’t lying, just viewing the night through the mess of her female brain. If a girl is not being chased or in control, minor alternations to reality will be made to make it so.

..
..
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I jerked off. It’s a long story.

Salta is the farthest up you can go into Argentina without seeing any inbreeding with the less attractive Bolivian race. With the eye of a sociologist and a liver of an alcoholic, I studied Salta’s nightlife for almost one week.

Wednesday. I was lucky enough to meet Keith, an Irish guy committed to going out more than me. We go to Salon VIP where they played reggaeton, salsa, and cumbia, apparently like most other clubs in town (two or three American hip hop songs are thrown in, always including the American classic “Yeah” by Usher). Coming from Bolivia this club was paradise, with cute girls averaging 17-24 years in age. A group of four Argentine English teachers approached us and kept us busy until the club closed at 5am. Similar to a problem I had in Lima, we debated if we could do better, but when you roll in at 3:30am you don’t have much time to work the crowd. $4 cover with free gigantic beer.

Thursday. I tagged along with a few French twenty-somethings to Line Out, a club way out in the suburbs of Tres Cerritos. This was the first night that I got to witness the horrible game of Argentine guys, who seem to be more concerned with proving to their guy friends they are macho than actually getting girls. An opener I saw a few times is pulling a girl’s hair (big surprise—it never worked!). Argentine girls, especially the young ones, are not familiar with indirect game, which means there is nothing stopping me from cleaning up in Argentina if I run into ones that know English and don’t mind my hairiness. $3 cover.

Friday. Two Dutch girls and I started in a club called Mao Mao, a place where 40-something Argentines come to get laid (on Friday night anyway). “Everybody Dance Now” played alongside Madonna as I stood in shock watching the Argentine version of my parents grinding with each other on the dancefloor. We stayed there for 45 minutes, mostly to wait for our next destination to get good since it was only 2AM (things get started late in this country). $4 cover with free drink.

We end up in Metropoli, a club packed with young people dancing to reggaeton and cumbia. It’s here I learn that it’s efficient to go after gigantic groups of girls because there is always one bound to speak English, though it’s usually not the cutest one. On this night I couldn’t drink because I started a course of cipro to kill remaining stomach issues that started in Bolivia, but it didn’t matter much because the girls themselves don’t drink like they do in the States; they have their free drink then just dance the rest of the night. Being sober in an Argentine club is easier and more acceptable than at home. $5 cover with free drink.

Saturday. We have a winner! Club XXI (Veinte Uno) is on Balcarce, the Adams Morgan-like strip where all the gringos and young Argentines go. There were three girls for every two guys, most of them in their early 20′s. Excellent house and reggaeton set the mood. It doesn’t get much better than this, and while the girls were of average friendliness, a little effort goes a long way into finding one that is both nice and cute. With another Irish clubbing partner, I’m finding that they are the only people who like going out (maybe because they all have drinking problems). A dozen or so people in my hostel didn’t go out on Saturday night because they were “tired.” $5 cover with free drink.

Sunday. Back to Salon VIP for their pre-Columbus day bash. Not liking the block long line, me and my Dutch wingman decided to bribe the bouncer with a 50 peso bill (about $16 US). Hilarity… uhhh.. ensued, but we did get in with high fives. Quality took a massive hit from the night before and there was some discomfort when I ran into those English teachers from my first night out, but this was the most lively night yet. The girls here were the least friendly of all the nights even though they were the ugliest, but I’m starting to think it’s a response to the aggressiveness of the guys. It was so packed that the only way to get through is to hold up your full beer like a torch to clear a path. For the first time ever I saw music video mixing (perhaps with these).

A strange policy of Salta’s clubs is that you must keep the same glass for the entire night or pay $0.75 for another one. You must also pay if you try to leave the club without a glass. What this means is that you have a bunch of guys walking around with empty cocktail glasses in their jean pockets. As a relatively wealthy gringo I am unaffected by the puny fine so I just pay the charge repeatedly throughout the night.

While Lima had more head-turners, Salta has very good foundation of cute girls in the 7 and 8 range with few fatties. I could live here for the girls, so I can only imagine how much better it will get as I move closer to Buenos Aires. Also, when someone needs a light, they don’t ask if you have a lighter, they ask if you have fire. It reminds me of The Fifth Element.