I speak Russian. I wouldn’t say that I’m fluent, but I can carry on a conversation and know five thousand words. My grammar is quite accurate, even when using more complicated grammar concepts like passive participles and verbal adverbs. My reading and writing is pretty good. I don’t get the opportunity to speak and listen as much as I’d like, but I have no problem carrying on a conversation. I chat with Russian girls all the time on the phone in Russian. It’s not a problem as long as the connection is clear. I spend several hours a week studying Russian, and not just for the purposes of chasing girls. I also study French regularly.
I originally developed an interest in this endeavor when I took of the hobby of studying foreign languages. I was always fascinated by the exoticness of Russian, and after I’d been studying for a few months I decided to enroll in a program at Moscow State University for foreigners study Russian. When I got to the university I was in shock: hot Slavic girls dressed fashionably wearing high heels. And they were friggin’ everywhere! It was a lot different from the college-town university I attended, where when a girl wore a collared shirt instead of a t-shirt she was dressing up.
After that, I made six trips to Russia chasing girls in various ways. I have some great stories in there, best told in conjunction with a liberal consumption of alcohol. In retrospect, I clearly underestimated the difficulty of this endeavor. This is only my second trip in three years. I have made plenty of mistakes on my trips. I’ve let a couple of great women slip through my fingers. On the other hand, I’ve seen and avoided most of the scams.
My biggest mistake is to chase the girl I can keep the interest of but not quite catch. A foreign guy in good shape with money and confidence can get some attention from hot girls just by being different. Having a foreign guy come and chase them can be entertaining for girls, and it’s a refreshing break from their normal lives. So, they’ll lead you on a little even if they don’t have a serious interest. On this trip I need to be better at detecting this situation and either (a) cutting them loose or (b) kicking up my game a notch.
The problem is now that having had the taste of Russian girls, I just can’t go back. Every time I go on a date in Silicon Valley, I just sit there thinking, “I had way more interesting prospects than you in the FSU, and I wouldn’t even answer their phone calls because I was so busy.” So, here I am on the path again.
I created a profile on mamba.ru. (This site is also known as love.mail.ru and some other portals.) I put quite a bit of time into writing the profile itself. A combination of editing, translation, finesse and appropriate bluntness resulted in a profile I was happy with. I used this same approach last year, but I improved my profile slightly and also had Anastassia translate some canned answers to questions that the girls normally ask. (like, “Why do you speak Russian?”)
I picked a city, then targeted girls from 24-30. I wrote to around six or seven hundred (no, that’s not a typo) girls, out of approximately five thousand profiles in the age range. I received responses from about 30-35% of them, although a large fraction of those weren’t serious. (Many just wrote one-word or one-line responses back.) I have a rule about writing to Russian girls: I don’t write with any girls whose Russian grammar is worse than mine. I have spent an enormous about of time over the past six weeks writing letters in Russian, I’m absolutely sick of it. I’m glad I’m finally to the portion when I get on the plane. On mamba.ru, many of the girls have “abandoned” their accounts and don’t log in. So, I didn’t write anyone that hadn’t logged on in the past month.
Last year I tried a similar approach and went to Nizhny Novgorod. I decided to change a few things this time:
1) I’d try to meet more girls toward the beginning of my trip, so that I’d have more free time with girls where there was an obvious connection. On my last trip I reserved time with girls and then ended up not having a connection with them, which just burned time.
2) I wrote more girls and “staged” when I started writing them, so if some fell through there would always be some interesting prospects to invite on a date.
On my trip last year I figured I would probably have my weekend days free, so I enrolled at a program at the Nizhny Novgorod Linguistic University. I wasn’t really satisfied with the quality of the instruction that I received, so I decided to skip it on this trip even though they have similar programs in Novosibirsk. I have some study material with me if I get bored and decide to dive into Russian study. There’s plenty of interesting stuff to do without lessons. I’m not worried about being bored.
I’ll be here for 16 days, ending and starting on a weekend, since weekends are usually the best time to meet with the girls.
I’d like to pontificate on my own strategy. If you want to read the rest of this, it can be found here: Russian Girl Novosibirsk