Passport Wins

I'm the last person you should ever listen to about relationships and picking up girls but since you're reading this you're not really listening, yeah? So read this:

The first trip I took to BsAs I didn't party all that much the first couple of weeks, I was too culture shocked to really get into it. The first time I really went out big was after I gave a speech at the game industry conference they have down here, EVA. I gave my speech in english to a standing ovation and then rocked out to dinner and drinks in Recoleta with the VIPs from Sony and the top 4 people in the local industry. Everything was paid for, it was baller as hell. After that the Sony people wanted to know where the party was at so my local amigos took them to Crobar. The Sony expense account was charged a couple hundred dollars to reserve a VIP table with a few hundred pesos worth of drink credit. I stood looking over the dance floor and told my friend "I feel like a demon god."

I went around trying to dance with some girls, they were kinda doing their own thing and that got me nowhere. So I was sitting back drinking and my man Chilkowski who runs NGD Studios told me "we have a saying here, let me see if I can translate it. The wallet kills the stud, but the passport kills the wallet."

"No entiendo," I said.

"Speak english."

It was just that simple.

So I went around speaking english to different girls. And I started getting e-mails, if I had a cell phone at the time they would have been phone numbers. I would go up, project a good onda and say "how y'all doin?"

"Oh, where are you from?"

"Why, the good 'ol U, S and A."

"Oh what part of the USA?"

"Like, California." (Seemed like the best State to rep, I'm not really from California.)

"Oh I love California! My dream is to go work in fashion in Los Angeles."

"Yeah I've been to LA a bunch of times, hell of a city."

It was easy. The english, to a large subset of argentinas, is like a hot knife melting through any of the typical reservations from talking with a stranger. There was a time when being American was like a shining badge of hope; and I've heard stories of what Russia was like for expats earlier this decade, or east Asia. These days America has pretty well done shot its global image and the attitude is interested for sure, but more from a point of novelty rather than admiration. None of that history really matters though, its still the ultimate opener.

Lots of guys figure this out early in their time here and they fall on it like a crutch. The truth is you have to speak some spanish, the more the better. English is a great opener but its only sustainable with only one of fifty girls who really know the language. And being foreign definitely doesn't give you full license to be a total dick, you just have to be less of a dick than the typical argentino.

I say, lets cross-pollinate cultures to the max.