Don’t Bang Latvia

Roosh V

© 2012 by Roosh V

http://www.rooshv.com

All rights reserved.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

I. Welcome To Latvia

II. Girls

III. Game

IV. Stories

V. Riga City Guide

Welcome To Latvia

When you think about Latvia you probably imagine a sea of blonde women. The country’s yearly Blonde Parade is now a major tourist destination, with photos of smiling blondes being shared on various Internet sites. It suggests that Latvia must be a country of unlimited blondes and beauty.

The Blonde Parade hype reminds me of the half-naked pictures of Brazilian women dancing atop floats during Brazil’s Carnival. Those photos want you to assume that Brazilian women walk around the street with their breasts exposed, ready to throw themselves on any foreign man who dares to take a risk and visit the country. The Blonde Parade would have you thinking that there is a surplus of blonde Latvian women who want to leave their godforsaken country for a strapping American man. Neither reflects reality.

The truth is that most Latvian women aren’t even blonde—they’re brunette. There isn’t a surplus of women compared to men until you get up in age to the 30s and 40s. Most disappointing of all, foreign men are actually seen as beneath the local men, for reasons this guide will explain.

Latvia is one of those places that used to be good, but is now forever ruined thanks to millions of sex tourists who arrived on Ryanair flights from England, Spain, Italy, and the Middle East. I’ve lived in places notorious for sex tourists, like Rio and Medellin, but in Riga the sheer amount of them blew those cities away, to the point where I can’t recommend you visit Latvia. The only exception is if you have a lot of time and want to complete the Baltic sweep of getting all three of your flags from the region (Latvia, Estonia, and Lithuania).

I advise for a standard two-week trip to get your flag, though it is possible to do it in one week if you pipeline heavily on Internet sites. The top-tier Latvian girls are extremely hard to crack, so odds are your Latvian flag will be a 6 or below. I actually recommend you stick in the 6 range for flag purposes because of how much easier they are to bang compared to girls of higher caliber.

Latvian Culture

Latvia has been influenced by the empires of Germany, Sweden, Poland, and Russia. Their most recent oppressor was Russia, which becomes obvious as you walk around the capital city of Riga and see almost as many signs in Russian as you do in Latvian.

When Stalin took over the country toward the end of World War II, he sent the Latvian upper classes to Siberia and replaced them not with Russia’s best and brightest, but criminals, menial laborers, and brutes, similar to how Australia was populated by the dregs of British society. This mass wave of Russian immigration helped transfer Latvian wealth and resources to the motherland at the expense of the local population. By the end of the 1940s, Latvia had lost 35% of its native population to war, murder, or exile.

It must be stated that the Russians completely occupied Latvia (it wasn’t a mere satellite like the Czech Republic or Poland). This is one of the reasons why today half the population is Russian, with more Russians as a percentage of its population than the other two Baltic countries. It’s no surprise that both the Latvians and Russians despise each other, with most of the hate coming from the Latvian side. Even young Latvians with no memory of the Russian occupation share in this deep-seated hatred. Consider that the most important monument in Riga is called the Freedom Monument, meant to commemorate when the Russian military left the country.

Attempts at Russification aside, Latvia feels somewhat like Iceland. The Old Town area of Riga is almost interchangeable with Reykjavik’s. Both have picturesque little buildings suitable for postcards. Both have tall and fair-skinned people whose languages sound similar, as long as you don’t count the Russians. Both peoples like to drink heavily on the weekends and stay out past four a.m. Even their shy and skeptical natures are the same. The main difference is the scams. Partially thanks to the Russian importation of thug and mafia culture, scamming is so prevalent in Riga that this is the only travel guide I’ve written that features a “Scammer” section.

Another quality that separates Latvians from other Scandinavians is their deep-seated paranoia. It takes an unnaturally long time for a Latvian to open up without alcohol. In conversations with many Latvian girls it felt like I was talking to rocks. Part of the reason is due to the abuse Russia fostered upon the country. A Latvian man told me, “We are closed because if we reveal too much information, you may use it against us. It goes back to our history when we were occupied by the Soviet Union.” Just like how a human being will grow up with severe emotional problems if abused as a young child, the same can occur with an entire nation. Out of the three Baltic countries, Latvia suffered most under Russian rule, and it shows.

There are not many extraordinary features when it comes to Latvian culture. The native food dishes involve fish or stews, though ethnic restaurants ranging from Italian to Japanese are common (one of the most popular restaurants was TGI Fridays). The vodka selection is respectable, but much less than what you’d find in Poland, with most people preferring to take multi-colored shots like in the States. The weather is brutally cold and dark in the winter and mild in the summer. Overall, Latvia appears to be a mash-up of Scandinavian and Russian culture.

Which City To Visit?

The obvious first choice is Riga, which has cheap flights coming from all corners of Europe. As you may have already guessed, Riga is a poor choice because of the changes that male tourists have made on the psyches of the local women. In the past these women may have welcomed you with open legs, but after hundreds of guys have already thrown themselves on them (with many offering upfront payment for sex), they are now unable to take foreign men seriously or even respect them.

Other men have yet to receive the memo that Riga isn’t what it once was, so they keep coming in the hope of a sex vacation, making the problem even worse. What has evolved is a new breed of scammer chick who exists solely to take money from foreigners. I received the memo, but foolishly ignored it.

If you want to avoid this miserable scenario, your option is to hit a second-tier city such as Daugavpils, where there is no scammer infrastructure like in Riga. Another option is to stay in the suburbs of Riga and frequent outlying clubs off the beaten path from tourists. While this strategy will require befriending a local to know where to go, it’s the best way to experience Riga if you decide to visit.

You’ll also have to ask yourself why you’re coming to Latvia—for Latvian women or Russian women. If you want Russian women, you might as well go to Russia. The visa process is a pain, but you won’t get the best of what Russian women have to offer while in Latvia. This guide mostly concerns Latvian women and how to get them in bed, not Russians.

If you’re a contrarian like me, you’re probably thinking of going in the winter when there are few tourists. This strategy is usually helpful in other cities, but in Riga it didn’t offer much advantage. By the time I left Riga in the middle of December, there were tons of male tourists on weekend getaways. At the same time, more Latvian women stayed warm at home instead of partying at night. There are many more tourists that come during the summer, but there are also more locals who use Riga as a home base to explore nearby beaches. If you decide to go, I don’t think it matters much as to when.

For a summer resort experience, try staying in the city of Liepāja, located on the Baltic Sea.

Logistics

Getting to and from Latvia offers no challenge. Go to Kayak.com for airfares. Hop on a bus if you’re in Estonia or Lithuania. Apartment lodging is relatively easy to obtain: a simple Google search on “city + (flat OR apartment)” will give you options for the cities I’ve mentioned. If you’re looking at stays of a week or less, expect to pay $60–70 a night, which is cheaper than a hotel. You’ll be able to get deals on a monthly rental that will put it around $600–1,000 a month. Of course this price is outrageously high to a local who has a multi-year lease, but expect to pay for the privilege of getting a fully furnished apartment with utilities at just a month’s commitment.

Besides the Google search I mentioned, another way to get a rental is to contact real estate offices in the city you’re going to once you’re on the ground. They always have a staple of furnished apartments for foreigners who visit on business. If you don’t mind shared housing, post an ad on the Couchsurfing (http://www.couchsurfing.org) group of the city where you want to stay. Click on Community, then on Find Groups, then enter the city in the search box.

There are no specific packing needs for Latvia, but I recommend that you bring an unlocked cell phone (get a SIM card from a mobile shop like Bite in any mall). One-night stands happen, but cell phone communication is important.

English is competently spoken by most people, even adults, so you’ll have only minor problems with communication. Since most Latvians know Russian, it makes more sense to learn Russian than Latvian, where it is of great help with taxi drivers who don’t speak English.

Doing Latvia On The Cheap

Latvian costs are reasonable and comparable to other Eastern European countries. Alcohol is more expensive, but food and lodging are cheaper than a country like Poland. If you rent an apartment, cook most of your meals, and don’t go nuts buying bottles at the club, you should be able to live very comfortably in a good part of town for around $2,000 a month.

I absolutely recommend you stay in short-term apartments than hotels. Though an apartment has less flash than a hotel, if you want to bang a Latvian girl, you’ll have to put on the air that you’re somewhat settled in the city and not a sex tourist. A hotel doesn’t accomplish this. Your main expense will definitely be lodging, and after that it’s smooth sailing with reasonable food and partying costs. Even an occasional splurge at an expensive restaurant with your Latvian date won’t break the bank. Here are some sample prices:

Decent lunch: $8

Crappy beer at snobby club: $6

Crappy beer at local pub: $4

Cover charge at average club: $5

Standard American serving of Jameson or decent liquor: $8

Short taxi ride (you don’t have to tip): $4

Apples (per pound): $1.25

Muffin or cookie at coffee shop: $2

Small latte: $3

I didn’t drink the tap water.

Now that you have all the information you need about getting to Latvia without spending your entire wad, let’s talk about how to sleep with the women.

II

Girls

There was so much hype about Latvian girls on the Internet that I was expecting to be blown away upon my arrival, but I actually settled into a mini depression. The girls are pretty, with plenty of beauties walking around, but there is also a growing obesity problem and a degree of Scandinavization that means sloppy dress and hipster styles. Even worse, there is the whole sex tourist issue that has given rise to a scammer industry where women try to trick you. It’s possible that I went into the country with unreasonably high expectations, but the fact that it had a hard time competing with Poland, which isn’t particularly known for beautiful women, shows that Latvia is getting much undeserved praise.

Latvia is my second Don’t Bang guide. The first was Denmark, where I was so annoyed by the women that I held them in contempt. Latvia was a little different. I didn’t hate the women, but I was unable to meet many who were pretty and normal. Most of my interactions were either short or involved a girl trying to take my money. In Denmark, the women were flat-out awful, but in Latvia I had more of a difficulty finding women I could connect with. The ROI from the game work I put in was pitifully low.

Appearance

Latvian girls are surprisingly fat. I felt like I was in America circa 1999. Instead of having 400-pound hippos roaming the land like present day America, Latvia has a ton of chubby chicks with thick, flabby arms. They share this with their Scandinavian cousins. On the bright side, they aren’t as fat as Estonian girls, who sometimes come in Super Size dimensions.

Latvian girls also share the Scandinavian habit of wearing cheap plastic black boots without heels, though thankfully a solid percentage of girls were walking around in high heels. For the first time in my life I saw quite a few girls wearing five-inch heels, though I suspect those girls were Russian and not Latvian. Latvian girls tend to dress more granola, as if preparing for a night at a dive bar. I was hoping for micro miniskirts like what they supposedly have in Russia, but I was sorely disappointed on that front. Sparing amounts of leg and cleavage were exposed.

The dominant hair color is brown, but eyes are usually blue, green, or gray. In this part of the world you run into a lot of girls whose eye color changes slightly depending on their mood or the angle of light entry. Their height is generally tall, sometimes bordering on the category of “that’s a big bitch.” Their breasts and asses are decidedly average. By far their best quality is their faces. Their small noses and high cheekbones give them a doll-like appearance that makes even chubby girls bangable.

There are many 9s walking around in Latvia, the reason that you’re probably thinking of going there in the first place, but unfortunately they’re not going to mess with you. They have their choice of the top dudes of the Latvian jungle and will pass on a foreigner who is only staying for a couple weeks.

Women with a rating of 7 and under are far more accessible, especially if they happen to love the English language or your country. The problem is that it’s the 7s who fit the profile of growing up to be a scammer chick, since they have just enough beauty to trick foreign men but not enough to get the top dogs of their country. Going to “normal” clubs without scammer chicks is torturous because the hottest girls are already taken and the cute girls don’t give you a chance since they assume you’re a sex tourist. All that’s left are the scraps.

Latvia does average on the Busted Dudes test, which aims to see if men are dating up (good) or dating down (bad). If you see a good-looking Latvian girl, she’s probably going out with a guy who’s on her level. You do see the phenomenon where a cute girl is out with a total troll of a guy just for his money, but this isn’t as common. I think an average score on this test is fair, and not something that will hurt you chances of getting a cute girl. It’s only when guys are dating down like in Western countries that you’ll have an uphill climb in landing a chick who is prettier than you are handsome.

The last comment I wanted to make about appearance is that you see more attractive girls walking around during the day than at night. This should set the stage for a day game scenario, but as you’ll learn, day game is rather unfruitful in Latvia. The more I think about the attractive women of Latvia, the more I get the feeling that foreign men can look, but can’t touch. The prettiest girls were both inaccessible and unreceptive.

Personality & Vibe

This is going to be a short section, simply because Latvian girls didn’t reveal their personalities to me during the month I was there. They laughed and made animated movements when around their friends, but around me they were as stiff as rocks, taking a long time to open up. I did meet one Latvian girl who was cool, but even she admitted that other Latvians considered her “weird” because of her outgoing and sarcastic nature. My portrait of Latvian girls is unfortunate.

Both day and night approaches resulted in the same cold reception, but there was one exception: Latvian girls with boyfriends. They were almost always friendly and flirtatious. If a conversation with a Latvian girl was going well, I braced myself for the boyfriend drop, which would come most of the time. A possible theory is that Latvian girls only act like full women when they’re actively getting fucked.

One reason I had a hard time connecting with Latvian girls was that their humor was different. They didn’t get my sarcasm like Scandinavians, or even Estonians. Even when I wasn’t joking around, I would get so many crickets to normal statements that I didn’t see any point in talking instead of dancing.

By far the biggest reason for the cold reception was due to the fact that I was a foreigner. I regularly saw girls that I had bombed with engage local guys who were worse looking or worse dressed than I was—the only country that has happened in. It happened with such frequency that I even started to question my game.

Types Of Latvian Girls

The first type of Latvian girl is under 25. They are just about pickup proof, greatly preferring Latvian men over foreign men, the first country I’ve been to where that preference was so pronounced. My rejections from them were swift and brutal.

I imagine this is what black guys have to face in many parts of the world. With blanket rejections from a lot of girls, I’m sure they have come to the conclusion (sometimes accurate) that the locals are racist. Along the same lines, my experience in Latvia tells me that many girls are xenophobes, wholly closed off to the idea of foreign cock. The sad part is that this is a recent development. I repeatedly heard that in the past they would flock to foreign meat.

Unlike American sluts, young Latvian girls know their value is highest in their youth, so the main goal of their existence is to get a guy into a relationship. If you only pick up one thing from my guide, it should be this: young Latvian girls greatly value relationships.

It was almost eerie how few girls were single or alone. Even in a coffee shop, a girl would almost always be with a guy. There was almost no point in hitting on her if she was alone because a guy would inevitably stroll in. Seeing so many couples in every venue was almost nauseating.

The best way to bang a young Latvian girl is to catch her on the rebound or while she’s drunk and away from her hardcore cockblocker girlfriends. Halfway through my trip, I stopped talking to girls who appeared to be under 25 because her friends guarded her pussy like a sentry, regularly cockblocking me before I could even finish my opener. The cockblock was so consistent that if it didn’t happen I figured I was talking to a scammer chick.

It didn’t help that girls were usually hanging out in huge groups, busy with friends instead of focusing on getting rammed by new cock. On the rare occasions I did get into a conversation without being immediately cockblocked, the girl would give almost no response to my ramble. She’d stand there like a sculpture, not ask me any personal questions, and then a friend would grab her away. It was frustrating, to say the least.

One of the reasons the younger girls are hard, besides wanting relationships, is that they aren’t going through their slut stage. In America, girls dive into sluttiness in their late teens and ramp it up in college. In Latvia, women don’t enter their slut stage until their 30s. Until then, they’re totally content getting into a relationship with a Latvian guy from their social circle.

There are a lot of strikes against us: she is relationship-minded, isn’t going through her slutty stage, doesn’t like foreigners, doesn’t get Western-style humor, and has 24-hour cockblockers at the ready. If you can figure out how to overcome all this, please let me know, because in Latvia all the girls I at least kissed were around 30 years old. This was disappointing since in Poland I was getting with girls 23 and younger (thankfully in Estonia I went back to banging younger girls).

The second type of Latvian girl is the older chick. She is most likely to have at least one kid from a failed marriage to an alcoholic (Latvia has the highest divorce rate in Europe). She doesn’t care about immediately getting into another serious relationship, much preferring to fuck. They don’t care about money or scamming you. Think of them as standard American girls who want to go out, drink, and screw, but ten years older. If you’re talking to a Latvian girl around 30 who asks you a couple questions, and has a kid, you’ll be fucking very soon. These older chicks will be your bread and butter. Forget about the college hangouts and go where mature women spend time in.

Then we have the Russian girls. They hang out in higher-end clubs that may have face control, meaning you need to either know someone or be on the guest list to get in. These girls don’t have a strong preference for Russian men, so if you have the right moves she’ll bang you the same night.

I believe the hottest girls in Riga are indeed Russian. They are also more friendly and not as eager to jump to the conclusion that you’re a sex tourist. If you’re able to find a club where they hang out (and can get in), you’ll be pleasantly surprised at both their beauty and friendly attitude. If I were forced to live in Riga, I’d weasel my way into the Russian scene and avoid the Latvians.

Next up is the ugly girl group. If you have low standards, you’ll think Riga is paradise because girls rated 5 or below practically throw themselves onto foreign men. They know their value is low and don’t put up any attitude when it comes time to fuck. Later I’ll share the story of an Italian man who banged nothing but ugly chicks during his stay.

The last group is the scammer chick. Normal girls leverage their beauty to land a relationship, but some Latvian and Russian girls have chosen to get paid instead. They’re affiliated with clubs and scam bars to get foreign men to buy drinks at inflated prices. The next section addresses this in detail.

In most countries, the name of the game is finding girls who speak English, but in Latvia this isn’t enough. You also need to find girls who like foreigners, won’t scam you, and want to fuck. Therefore, I advise you to go after older women, the easiest way to get your flag.

Scammer Girls

Similar to how the U.S. State Department puts out travel advisories of dangerous locations, I’m declaring the first ever Roosh Travel Warning for the European city of Riga. I’ve been to a lot of places, but I’ve never seen such a consistent and deliberate attempt by locals to scam foreign men. It got so bad that after two weeks in the city I didn’t even want to go out anymore.

First up is the bar scam. Here, a girl you meet in a club or on the street will be exceedingly open to your game, smiling and maybe even touching you. She’ll suggest that you go to a bar or club that ends up having drink prices at least three times higher than normal. Of course she’ll ask for the most expensive drink possible, such as a double martini. Once the drinks are made, you’re stuck with a high bill. The girl gets a cut of every drink sold, and at the end of the night she’ll bid you farewell with some of your money in her purse.

It used to be that you were ripped off hard with prices that were ten times as high, like 500 euros for a bottle of champagne. If you refused to pay, a pair of Russian thugs would pummel you. The authorities clamped down on the heavier version of this scam, but the softer version still exists.

There are two easy counterstrategies to this scam. First, always ask how much a drink is before ordering. Second, never let a girl decide where to take you. Even if it’s your first day in town and you know of only one bar that you briefly walked by, take her there. Women by nature aren’t so keen to pick where to go, preferring that the man decide, so a girl who right away mentions a place she wants to take you is probably a scam artist.

The apartment scam results in even greater loss of property. A girl will happily follow you to your apartment after a bit of dancing. You’ll both fall asleep, maybe after having sex. When you wake up, your iPhone and passport will be gone, along with the girl. The counterstrategy here is to safely store your belongings before going out. If you do end up having sex with her, kick her out afterwards by saying you have to get up early.

The roofie scam is easy to figure out. She’ll drug your drink, probably in your own apartment, and then steal your shit. The counterstrategy is never to accept anything from her that you didn’t personally see her make.

Lastly we have the prostitute scam, which isn’t so much a scam as it is craftiness. A girl will pretend she likes you, turn you on immensely, and then ask for money when it’s obvious you want sex. Normal prostitution rules will apply, so don’t give her a dime until you get what you want. If she’s an amateur prostitute without a pimp, you’ll probably be able to scam her right back by not paying. The counterstrategy to this is to be wary of situations that are too good to be true. If she’s super easy, there’s probably a reason, since Latvian girls normally take as much time as American girls to get into bed (usually more). Another tip is to get her so drunk and horny that she wants to fuck even without getting paid.

If you’re in a club where there are a lot of foreign guys, I guarantee there are tons of scammer chicks present. There are several signs to look for: they hang out in pairs at tourist clubs; they always dress sexy; they never buy their own drinks (it would reduce their profit margin); they make regular eye contact with foreign guys; they’re under 30 years old; and they aren’t in the club with a guy friend (they don’t want to scare away the male clientele). I like to think that my people-reading skills are advanced and that I can pick out acting better than the average guy, but there were three scam attempts done on me that I didn’t see coming. These girls are amazing actresses and will deceive you even if you’re experienced. As long as you keep the counterstrategies in mind, you’ll be straight.

A phenomenon I noticed with scammer chicks is that they’re not permanently scamming: they may only turn it on when they see a good mark. On Friday night she’ll be a normal chick to a Latvian dude she meets, but on Saturday night she senses weakness from a desperate and drunk Spanish dude and starts the scam engine.

If you see a foreign dude holding hands with a hot local, don’t get jealous because there’s a good chance he’s in the process of being scammed. I know because I was that dude. A pretty girl was holding my hand in a club, making me feel like a million bucks, but after we left she tried to scam me.

A large number of women in Riga have absolutely no qualms about scamming, being paid for sex, or outright stealing. Just like someone would rationalize stealing from a corporate chain because it’s a “huge company,” these girls think you’re rich and can handle parting with some cash since you have more money than she does. In other countries, a girl would rather be a maid than steal from someone, but in Latvia they don’t care. There’s no cultural filter to stop people from stealing, something that’s also common in Latin America, but at least there it’s the dudes who try to rob you in straight-up muggings. In Latvia, women are the front line robbers.

I can handle being in a country where the women are hard. I don’t like working too much, but I’ll grind it out to get pussy. Being in a country where women are scammers is another story. I like to think I’m smart and can eventually learn enough to outwit the scammers, but I don’t want to be in a place where so many women are trying to trick me. I’d rather get rejected 100 times than be scammed even once. For that reason, I’ll never return to Latvia again.

Approach Index

My approach index states how many girls an average-looking guy with decent game has to approach before he’s likely to bang a cute girl (not including Internet approaches). Since there are so many variables involved, the index is best used to compare the easiness of one country with others. First, let me share the numbers from previous countries, from easiest to hardest:

Iceland: 40

Poland: 45

United States: 45

Brazil: 50

Denmark: 50

Colombia: 60

Argentina: 90

From these numbers we can conclude that a man has to do twice as many approaches to get laid in Argentina than the United States. For Latvia, I’m assigning an approach index value of 60, the same as Colombia. While in Colombia a lot of approaches will be wasted on girls who don’t speak English, in Latvia many of those will be instant rejections by girls who simply don’t want to talk to foreigners. If you go for older chicks, I’m confident that you’ll get your flag much sooner, to something more in line with Poland and the States.

III

Game

Getting your Latvian flag will be a chore. Day and night game were doing so poorly for me that I was forced to get on the Internet in search of some decent prospects. Your best bet is the primitive strategy of approaching in high numbers everywhere: day, night, and Internet.

Internet Game

In Latvia, the girls online are hotter than the ones you find in a club, for a reason you may already suspect: most girls online are Russian. If it wasn’t for the Russian girls, I wonder if Latvia would get as much praise as it receives.

The quickest way to get conversations going with local girls is to use Badoo.com, which is like a Facebook for dating. The game here is more similar to text messaging than Internet dating. Start with a “Hello, how are you?” then get a couple exchanges going about how you’re visiting Riga and if she likes English. Ask her a personal question to see if she responds with enthusiasm. You don’t need to wait long before asking her out for a drink.

I recommend you pay extra for the site’s Superpowers feature, which allows you to see which girls viewed your profile and want to meet you. The Encounters feature is also a good way to find out which girls are interested so you don’t have to message them cold. Thankfully, I didn’t encounter any scams on Badoo. It will be obvious when a girl is a prostitute because she’ll have dozens of modeling photos of herself.

The top Latvian dating site is Oho (http://www.oho.lv). It was hard to figure out since it was completely in Latvian.

You can also try CouchSurfing.org, a site I’ve recommended in the past. The biggest problem is that girls are more concerned with cultural exchanges with people from a different country than getting stuffed by foreign cock, but you can use it to get into a little social circle. I use CouchSurfing mostly to find out where cute girls hang out. A few days before arrival I send the following message and review the responses to pick out venues that are mentioned more than once. Here’s my standard message:

Hi Victoria,

I’m coming to Riga next week and was wondering if you have any advice on nice lounges or wine bars that I could visit. I’ve never been to your city before and don’t trust the recommendations in my guidebook. Any help is appreciated.

Also, I noticed you lived in Istanbul, which is where my mom is from. Are there a lot of Turks in Latvia?

Roosh

The first paragraph is the same for all girls and the second is customized to what’s in her profile. The customization portion can be short. It’s just to show that you’re not a copy-and-paste monkey. If her profile is blank, you can either skip the customization paragraph or say something like, “By the way, your photos are nice, but it’s hard to tell what you’re like since there isn’t much in your profile.”

The “lounges or wine bars” can also be changed. If she’s over twenty-five, I keep it as is, but if she’s younger, maybe I’ll say “rock bars” or “underground bars.”

If she replies and goes out of her way to help you, remark on how you don’t know many Latvian people and then ask if she wants to meet up for a drink. When it comes to CouchSurfing, I only go for a meet-up when she’s asking me personal questions.

Before your trip to Latvia, I recommend you message at least ten girls on CouchSurfing and thirty girls on Badoo to get a couple meet-ups. Remember to go for the older girls first.

Day Game

Day game was so utterly useless in Latvia that I don’t even feel qualified to write this section of the book. I tried many approaches in malls, coffee shops, and on the street with zero success, similar to my failure in Iceland. It didn’t help that I went in the winter, when it would start to get dark at 4:00 p.m.

The best way I can describe the girls during the day is friendly but curt. They barely spoke outside of one-word answers and didn’t do anything to involve themselves in the conversation. They weren’t rude, but didn’t respond to any of my bait. Few girls even bothered to ask where I was from. Even in countries where day game isn’t usually run, girls will be receptive to a foreign man trying to chat them up. Latvia and Iceland are two places where that’s not the case. The irony is that girls in Estonia, just a short bus ride away, are much more receptive to day game approaches.

I came to the conclusion that the only time it’s worth approaching during the day is when a girl gives you extended eye contact of at least one second. In that case you can open with almost anything. A tourist question of asking for a “good coffee shop” or something of the sort will be enough. My most successful approaches on the street were actually later at night after 9:00 p.m., when girls were in more of a conversational mood. They’d give me extended eye contact on the street and I’d ask the first thing that was on my mind, resulting in an instant date or number. It shouldn’t be surprising that older women gave the most eye contact and were, by far, the most receptive to my attempts.

Night Game

The first problem you’ll encounter in Latvia is that going out alone displays lower value, unlike other places where it may be seen as confident. The responses I got from women when I went out solo versus when I went out with an Italian wingman were like night and day in terms of how much nicer women were to me.

While I did eventually get my flag from a solo night out, in Latvia a lone wolf is seen as an awkward outsider who doesn’t have any friends. Even scammer chicks don’t like dudes who are solo since they’re always in pairs (one guy is only half the potential money they could pull). I strongly urge you to either go with a friend or make one while you’re there, preferably a local who will serve as human proof that you’re not just another sex tourist.

Venue Selection

Latvian nightlife has either small dive bars where most people sit down or huge clubs where dancing is the norm. There’s almost no middle ground of American-style bars where most people are standing and talking, so for meeting girls you’ll be stuck going to the clubs. On the weekends, people start heading out around midnight to the big clubs, though some don’t peak until 2:00 a.m. The dive bars see customers much earlier. On weekdays, 11:00 is a good time to head out.

The key to successful night game is finding a venue that fits the following qualifications: you can get in, there are no scammer chicks, the average age approaches 30, and there are few foreign dudes to remind women of sex tourism. It’s not enough for the place to have girls—you need it to fit the above criteria if you want to get your flag. If you can find a guy to hang out with at a type of place I just mentioned, it won’t take much work to get lucky. In that case, you’ll probably think my entire guide is nonsense since you won’t run into scammer chicks or cockblockers. However, without a local guide and proper venue selection, you’re not going to experience the best of what Latvia has to offer, especially in Riga.

Clubs are either normal or scam. In the normal clubs you’ll encounter cold girls and constant cockblockery, unless it’s a venue where older women hang out at. In scam clubs you’ll encounter women who are friendly as long as you buy them a drink within the first couple minutes of the approach.

In Latvia I recommend you follow my three blowout rule, which states that you should leave any venue where you get blown out three times in a row. Getting blown out occasionally is actually a good sign that you’re in a normal club, but too many blow-outs and you need to find a new place to hunt.

Approaching & Escalating

There are two types of optimal game in Latvia, one to use on scammer chicks and the other to use on normal chicks. Scammer chicks get turned on by game that would be considered cheesy in America. This includes buying drinks and taking out large stacks of cash to make your drink purchases. Your style or looks matter very little compared with how much money you have.

In normal clubs, the best game is a continuous loop of chatting, dancing, and drink buying. Your energy should be high, like you’re having the most fun in the world. This “loop game” is simple and probably something you did when you were younger.

First, fish for eye contact. Latvian girls aren’t shy about staring at guys they like (it’s similar to what Brazilian girls do). While any girl is fair game, you’ll do better if you first approach the ones who give you eye contact. Deliver your opener and have a brief chat under five minutes long. If she’s shy, two minutes is more than enough.

Second, ask her to dance. Dancing is the main method that local guys use to build attraction with women, so it’s something you’ll have to do a lot of. After a fair amount of time dancing, invite her to the bar to buy her a drink, which will probably be 20–30 minutes into the interaction. Enjoy your drink for a few minutes, talk some more, then go back to the dance floor. Dance awhile then come back to the bar to drink and chat some more. Repeat this loop for at least an hour until you’re able to get more intimate on the dance floor. At some point, the loop kicks out to a kiss, usually while dancing, since that’s the easiest way to get a kiss in a club.

Loop game accounts for the fact that Latvian girls are more comfortable dancing instead of talking. My experience has shown that Latvian girls do not want to have a three-hour chat with a guy in a club. They have a lot of trouble maintaining a conversation and will go silent much earlier than you’d expect. Therefore, there’s no point going to Latvia unless you’re ready to dance for extended periods of time. Dance game goes off well in Latvia and should be your main method of attack while in a club.

It was hard to figure out what Latvian girls wanted besides alcohol, dancing, and in the case of scammer chicks, money. Very few girls care about charm, wit, or humor. If a Latvian girl does like humor, chances are she has lived in England or America. Funny responses to her questions won’t get the desired response.

Latvian women simply don’t value the things Western women do, and trying to force it upon them will be met by crickets. They show such a lack of stimulation to typical game that it is sure to make you question whatever theories of game or attraction you may have. Don’t hit her with anything deep or substantial. Don’t try to tell her a story or offer any double entendres. She won’t get it, and even if she does, she won’t care.

Approach her with dancing and drinking in mind. If the approach hits and you’ve kissed her on the dance floor, go for a venue change to your apartment by asking if she wants to come over for a drink before going home. No complicated technique is needed. If she resists your suggestion, say, “Look, I know what you’re thinking, but just because you come back to my place doesn’t mean sex is going to happen. We’re just going to have a drink and you can leave whenever you want.” For me this line evaporated afterparty resistance from three Latvian girls. Loop game, followed by the afterparty move, is the best way to get your Latvian flag, but it will take quite a few approaches before you’ll be successful.

The verdict is still out on whether Latvia is a one-night stand culture or not. With the Westernized girls and part-time scammers, you could say it is, but with the normal girls you meet when they’re out with huge groups of friends, you won’t be walking out with more than a number. If you focus on older women who are with only one other friend, you shouldn’t have a problem bringing them back home quickly, but be warned that some girls will come home with you and not put out, as happened to me. It may take one or two dates to seal the deal.

Another type of game that’s useful in Latvia is last call game, which I first described in Bang Iceland. With this game, you simply wait until the end of the night to do your approaches on girls who are drunk or separated from their pack of friends. Both Latvian and Icelandic girls are usually skeptical of men trying to pick them up, especially foreigners, so waiting until the end for maximum drunkenness gives you a better chance at receiving favorable responses. This also allows you to do a quick venue change to your apartment for an afterparty.

Most of the positive responses I got from Latvian girls in a club came late at night, when they were at least moderately inebriated. It’s no surprise that Latvian nightlife runs late like Icelandic nightlife, often until 5:00 a.m. Toward the end of my stay I didn’t bother doing much in the way of approaches before 2:00. A successful approach before that time depended almost entirely on a girl having a preference for foreign guys.

Hurdles & Problems

Besides scammer chicks and the cold reception to both day and night game, the most immediate problem you’ll face is cockblocking. It was so automatic, so blatant, and came so early in the conversation that it discouraged me from doing any approaches at all. It was even worse than in America.

If a girl was in a group of four or more, the cockblock would come whether or not she was isolated from the pack at the moment of approach. The blocker would walk several feet over just to kill my game even if the target seemed to be enjoying the chat. I’m guessing there’s some cultural force at work where Latvians want to “protect” their friends. The guys also were quick to block.

There was almost no blocking when girls were in pairs. In that case, a girl would bow out by saying something like, “I don’t want to leave my [ugly] friend alone.” I didn’t mind getting rejected in this respectful manner. As an interesting aside, I found that Russian girls were far less likely to cockblock than Latvian girls. I wonder if blocking comes from Scandinavian influence, since it happened to me somewhat regularly in Denmark.

Cockblocking and attitude tend to go hand-in-hand, since it takes a rude person to execute a block. I did experience attitude while approaching where I was flat-out ignored, not even worthy of a one-word response. It’s the type of harsh rejection that makes you look around to see if any other girl saw you get cut down. I found myself dishing back the attitude to some girls, especially the blockers, something I hadn’t had to do in seven months in Poland. On some nights I felt that I was experiencing attitude similar to Washington DC.

Another problem I had was getting out-gamed. Latvia is the only place where local dudes consistently out-pulled me. I’d approach a girl with a simple opener (e.g., “You look like you speak English” or “You don’t look like you’re from Latvia”), she’d reject me, and then a Latvian guy with dubious game and uglier looks than myself would get much farther than I did. On two occasions I saw guys kiss girls I had failed with. The last time that has happened was when I was first starting game in my early 20s, so I’m sure you can understand how humbling and borderline humiliating it was for me.

The worst part was that the guys were using basic game of smiling and dancing that I hadn’t used in a decade. I failed with talking while they kept it going by merely spinning her on the dance floor. I can’t stress how important dancing is when getting to know a Latvian girl.

Additional Game Analysis    

Other Guys’ Game

I gotta give Latvian guys credit: they know how to pick up their women. Not only do they approach, but they hit girls with game that’s well-received. Their hair is a little foppish but they have better game and style than Polish dudes, who never out-gamed me. Latvia isn’t a country where you want to hesitate on making a move because the next thing you know a local dude is going to approach and she’ll actually like him. In some venues I felt as if it was a race to approach girls before the Latvian guys could sink their claws into them.

The same compliments can’t be said for the game of British and Italian guys, the two main groups of sex tourists that visit Riga. The British guys I saw had no class and preferred to roll in obnoxious stag parties. Italian guys were more well-mannered but weren’t the stereotypical Italian men walking down the streets of Milan in suits. They wore knock-off jeans instead.

A lot of feminist haters in America say that guys who travel can’t get laid in the States. I think most men travel to get better girls, but I have to admit that there was a strong “loser” odor coming from the British and Italian guys in Riga, much more than sex tourists from other places I’ve been to such as Rio and Medellin. They were the type of guys who really thought girls would throw themselves on them just because they were foreign.

I don’t care what other foreign dudes do, and even if they’re losers, more power to them for hopping on a plane to travel. The problem was that girls would unconsciously group me in with them. I came to that conclusion because girls would attempt to scam me even after I told I was aware of scammers in Riga. They thought I was a naïve horny foreigner like they had encountered many times in the past.

In my never-ending scientific quest to figure shit out, I think I know why foreign guys come disproportionately more to Riga than other Baltic countries: Latvian girls will accept money for sex, even if they’re not full-time prostitutes. It’s really hard not to fuck a Latvian girl when there’s always the backup option to pay for it.

I have a theory about how it evolved. Early tourists came to Latvia to hit on normal girls, but experienced resistance when it came time to seal the deal. Being relatively rich, they simply offered the girls money to break them down instead of playing the dating game due to a lack of time. For whatever reason, Latvia’s culture doesn’t look down on women who accept money for sex, so the exchange took place.

Word spread that Latvia has beautiful and “easy” women, and the result was what I saw in late 2011, where you have normal girls who refuse to accept money for sex and are extremely hard for foreigners to pick up, and then the scammer girls and part-time prostitutes (semi-pros), for whom anything goes. The interesting part is that a scammer chick can be a normal girl 29 days out of the month, but on the one day she’s broke she’ll call up a slutty friend to hit the foreigner clubs to make some money by lending out her vagina.

If a scammer chick goes home with you after you’ve evaded getting ripped off at the bar she tried to drag you to, she’ll attempt to extract your money by various other means, even resorting to a hard luck story about her family that includes real tears. As you’ll read in the Stories chapter, their act can be very convincing.

Getting a local wingman can solve a lot of these problems. The girls won’t see you as a sex tourist, a potential cockblocker may take a liking to him, and you’ll find out the current hotspots. One night I went out with a Russian guy to a predominately Russian club and the responses were exceedingly warm when I introduced him as “my Russian friend from Riga.” They were so warm that, if I had to go to Riga again, I would actually pay a local dude to go to clubs with me, something I have never considered elsewhere.

The Race Factor

Latvia is in one of the more racist parts of the word, especially against blacks. I’ve never heard the word “nigger” so many times in such a short period—from Latvians, Russians, and even other tourists. It’s no surprise that I only saw three or four black guys during the month I was there.

I also didn’t run into many Asians or Indians. Most of the tourists I saw were Western European, whose appearance is looked upon favorably. I did see a few Middle Eastern guys, but they seemed to be involved with scammer chicks more than normal ones.

Therefore, Latvia isn’t a place I’d recommend to minorities. The Baltics get a lot of carry-over racism from Russia that you don’t see in Scandinavia or points west. While I’m not suggesting you won’t be able to pull if you’re a minority, it would be a better idea to test it out for a short weekend before committing a larger amount of time.

Stories

She Is Bitch

My mind was already on Ukraine. I could stick a fork in the juicy hype that was buzzing around it. “Learn Russian,” the guys who had been there would say to me. “Go before the Euro 2012, before it gets spoiled,” they’d add.

Every night I’d grab my mp3 player and take a walk outside in Riga’s Old Town to knock out an hour of Pimsleur Russian, the steady cadence of my footsteps acting like a metronome to keep my brain focused. I started the nightly walk in Poland and carried it into Riga.

“Every word counts,” my language motto goes. Winter’s arrival made the walks cold, but strengthened my resolve. Like a bodybuilder, I was working hard in the off-season to show a lot of new muscle when it was time to take off my shirt in the summer.

The Old Town of Riga was deserted during the week. There was no one to hear me doing my Russian courses under my breath, saying things like “Excuse me, where is the central square?” or “My wife and I want to drink something.” I’d put myself on a loop that would take me past coffee shops, office buildings, and residential apartments that had somehow escaped the ugly Soviet-bloc style of architecture. The occasional taxi would roll by on the cobblestone streets, looking for a tourist to scam with their rigged meters and “Euro only” payment demands.

One Wednesday night during a walk I saw a short man with dark features approaching me. He stopped a few feet away. I hit pause on my player, only two minutes left in my lesson, expecting to resume it shortly.

“Do you know a good place to go tonight?” he said in a thick Italian accent.

A sex tourist, I thought.

I took off my headphones. “Wednesday is a tough night. There’s a place called Milk, but you have to take a taxi. Besides there, I’ve never been out on a Wednesday night. Things don’t get started until the weekend.”

“How about in Old Town? Where can I go?”

“You can always try the Colonel. If that place doesn’t have people, I doubt anywhere else will,” I said.

“Where are you from? Are you American?”

“Yeah, I’m from Washington DC. And you?”

“I’m from Italy. You’re traveling here?”

“I’m staying for a month. I’ve been here for a couple weeks so far, but I don’t like it too much.”

“You’re walking like you are upset. I could see in your face that you’re not happy. Look, what are you doing right now? Did you eat?”

“Actually, I was right about to go to TGI Fridays to get an American burger. I haven’t had one in the while. You’re welcome to come with me.” He stuck out his hand and introduced himself as Luigi. We walked to the restaurant and got a table.

Whatever image you have of a stereotypical Italian wouldn’t be far from Luigi. He was short, not more than 5 feet 4 inches tall, with a slightly round belly. He had a clean face with wide eyes that made him always seem curious. He talked exactly like the mobster types in Hollywood movies, with the same hand gestures and Italian filler noises like the teeth sucking and the “Ah’s” and the catch phrases like the “Oh, come on!” and the “Don’t-uh bullsheet me!” and “I swear on my seester!” He was one year older than me and could probably have passed for my brother.

He said, “Before I came up to you, I was positive you were Italian. I was going to speak Italian, but at the last minute I changed to English because of your clothes.”

“I get that a lot. When I was in Poland, most of the girls thought I was from Spain, but Italian was the second most popular guess.” He nodded and I continued, “I had a great time in Poland, but so far Riga has been a huge disappointment. So many guys said this place was amazing for women, but I’m just not seeing it, and I feel like I’ve been everywhere in the city. I’m ready to give up.”

“Look, I’ve been here twenty times. If you came five years ago, the women would throw themselves on you, but now it’s shit. I don’t know what happened, but I swear on my seester it used to be better. Every girl wanted a foreigner, but now they don’t care. Riga is finished.”

“So why are you here?”

“It’s like a drug, I just keep coming back because I’m stupid, because I know the city and I’ve met so many women before. I fell in love one time here with a girl, four years ago. She wasn’t blonde, but she had the beautiful blue eyes. She looked like a doll. I told her I want to be with her forever. I pay for her to come to Italy, I introduce her to my family, I treat her like my queen, and then in the end, she fuck me. She left me for another guy who had more money than me. These girls, they are obsessed with money. They don’t care about you, how you look, your job, your personality, just if you have money.”

“How did she screw you?”

“Before she came to Sicily, she said she wanted to see Rome for two days. Why do you think she wanted to go to Rome? Because she has a cock there. These girls have cock everywhere—you can’t trust them. So she came to Sicily but she changed. In Latvia she think I was a rich man, and compared to men here I was, but in Italy I am normal. She knew that and right away tried to get a better man.”

“Is that what you’re looking for here? A wife?” My burger and fries arrived. Luigi was on auto-pilot now.

“No, I have a girlfriend. I come here just to play. We live in Ireland because I hate Italy. Look at me, do I look like typical Italian white trash? I know you’ve seen the Italians here. They are nothing, they are shit. Back at home they live with their mother and father until they are 40 years old. They don’t have a job and come here because flight is cheap. I don’t want to be like this trash. I want to be successful. I want to have class. I have a good job. I have my iPhone at home. I want to travel. I want to experience the world. When I go home and visit my family they don’t understand me, why I do this. I don’t want to be like an Italian.”

“Let me tell you,” he said, “I love America. I love America with all my heart. The people there, they believe, they are optimists. ‘Yes, we can!’ Your flag is on the moon! You are the biggest country in the world. Americans can do anything they want. You don’t know how lucky you are to be one, how much power you have.”

“Maybe in the past it was great to be American, but I think our time is gone.”

“No, it’s still here. America is a dream that people still believe in. It’s the fantasy, the movies, the music, New York City, Las Vegas, Miami. Come on, man, you’re American. Be proud! Girls here love America. I will die for your passport.”

“I’m not sensing that. The girls here don’t seem to care.”

“That’s because you’re going to the wrong places. We will go out, I’ll take you to the right places. I come to Riga and I get a girl every night. Tonight we will meet girls. We will do it.”

“But it’s Wednesday. Where can we go?” I asked.

“Don’t worry, we will find a place. We will do it!”

Was an Italian man selling me the American dream? Yes, he was—and I was buying. This was part of his infectious nature, his game. He made you believe in yourself, selling you fantasies, and even when it turned out that those fantasies weren’t true, you wanted to go back to hear more. Luigi gave me faith in myself, shutting down the voice of logic and reason. I wanted to believe him. I wanted to believe that my American passport mattered in Latvia, where every one of my experiences so far had contradicted that.

“I went to New York City many times and they don’t care about my accent. I go to a bar and I try to talk to the girls, but they don’t talk to me. I love America but I don’t understand American women. ‘Do you want to smoke? Do you want to talk? Do you want to do dance? Do you want to drink? Do you want to fuck? What the fuck do you want?’ Then I go to Canada and I talk in my accent, like Tony Soprano, and the girls they like it. They compliment me. I can’t live in America because it’s hard to get a green card, but I will move to Canada. Close enough, just no guns. But I still love America.”

“What do Latvian girls want?” I asked.

“They want money! It’s their sickness. It is so sad that you have beautiful girls here and they will give you pussy for a couple drinks and 20 lats.” [20 lats is $40 dollars.]

“Yes, but you keep coming back. You’re part of the problem, no?”

“Yes, because I love the blonde girl here. They are my dream and I come here and give them what they want. I sell them the dream and I fuck them, and if they ask me for 20 lat then I will give it to them as long as I can fuck. I’m going to marry my girlfriend one day, she is going to be the mother of my child. This trip is my last one here. This is… how do you say in America when a man is going to get married?”

“Bachelor party?”

“Yes, this is my bachelor party. Please teach me the English, all the slang. I want to know it.”

“So all these girls are prostitutes?”

“Yes and no. These girls are not prostitutes, but they are looking for opportunity. So either you sell them the dream, the future with you in America, or you give them the money. But you don’t go to a girl and say ‘How much?’ Maybe she asks you before sex, maybe she asks after sex. Maybe she never asks you. It’s not always so clear.”

I had long ago started taking notes with my pen on what he saying, jotting things down on my paper placemat. He knew I wrote travel guides, so he stressed important things by adding, “Put that in your book!”

I said, “In American slang, we call girls like that semi-professionals, or semi-pros. They’re not full-blown prostitutes, but they’re not normal girls, either. The line is blurry and you’re not sure what you’re getting. But I only want a normal girl.”

“You want a normal girl in a fucked-up place? Roosh, this is not America. This is not Italy or Sweden. The people here have no class. They don’t care about who you are as a man. They want money and they want a future. They want to trade their beauty for something, for something they can touch and feel.”

“I guess that explains why the first Latvian girl I fucked had lived in England for a long time. She seemed more Western than Latvian. I think there are normal Latvian girls, but they’re just hard to talk to.”

“Yes, they are hard because they think you are a sex tourist. The normal girls only want a Latvian man. So we have to deal with the girls who are bitches, who want money. Those are the two types of girls here, the normal girl and the bitch. You are going to normal clubs and getting nowhere, right?”

“Right.”

“You must go to the bitch club and treat those girls like a bitch. It’s very easy here, I will explain it to you.” He took a dramatic sip of his mojito. My pen was ready. “They don’t like cheap men. Very early you have to buy her a drink.”

“Right away?”

“It depends. I like to start with conversation, but you can even go up to a girl and say, ‘Would you like to have a drink with me?’ This is why in Latvia it’s important to go out with a friend. That’s why I talked to you outside. I don’t want to go out alone. I hate being alone. Two is perfect here because the girls are always in twos. That’s how you know a girl is a bitch because she won’t be in a big group. If ten of her friends are making a big party, she’s a normal girl and you won’t get anywhere.”

“Yeah I always get cockblocked when approaching a girl who’s part of a big group. They don’t even let me finish my opening line. Right away a friend comes and takes her away, like she’s trying to save her from being raped or something.”

“Yes because they think you are a sex tourist.”

“Do you think I look like a sex tourist?” Maybe I was putting out a sex tourist vibe.

“No, man, you don’t look like a sex tourist, but you’re a foreigner. The normal girls do not like foreigners anymore. Forget about it. Look at the time, almost 12:00. Let’s get the check and go. I’ll tell you the rest later.”

We paid the bill and left. I was ready to follow Luigi’s lead.

He walked with me to my apartment so I could drop off my laptop and wash up. He said there was no time for me to take a shower, so I just brushed my teeth and scrubbed my armpits over the sink. Once back on the street, he started telling me about his method.

“This isn’t like America where you have to go in circles to talk to a woman. They want a strong, direct man here. Give her a good look in the eyes, smile, hold it, and then ask her how she’s doing. That’s it. You’ll know right away if she wants to talk to you or not. Let me see your smile.”

I smiled.

“Okay, fake smiles aren’t so great, but that’s a good start. Just smile and look her in the eyes. Don’t be scared, and don’t look away first.”

After I went to an ATM to withdraw some cash, we saw two girls coming up the sidewalk. One was cute and playing with her dog. The other was a land whale who had managed to fit into a party dress two sizes too small.

“Want to demonstrate?” I asked.

He stopped next to the girls and said, “Hi, ladies, how are you?”

The fat one responded instantly, complimenting his accent and asking where he was from. Even the cute one was friendly, so we all engaged in small talk. The fat girl turned into a bit of a stalker, however, following Luigi and me for a block until finally getting the hint.

“That girl is too fat,” he said. “I just wanted to show you what I mean.”

“What’s funny is that those girls were more receptive than I would have thought. If I approached them alone, I doubt if they would have responded like that.”

“The girls here think it’s weird when you go out alone. They don’t like it.”

“It was the opposite in Poland. I’d go out alone and the girls would commend me, saying they liked my confidence.”

“Yes, because Poland is a normal place. Remember that we’re in a shit place and things are different. I teach you so you understand.”

We walked to the front of a tourist club called Scandal, debating whether we should go in or not. Then a pretty brunette said hi to us. Wow, I thought, being with a friend really improves things. Luigi took over the conversation and asked what her and her tall friend were up to. They said they couldn’t get in because the brunette was too young and the bouncer she knows wasn’t working. They asked if we wanted to go to another club where she could get in. Luigi enthusiastically accepted.

I always do research on a country before I fly in. One thing I read about Riga is that a girl will lead you to a bar of her choosing where prices are grossly inflated. She gets a cut of the proceeds and slowly drains your wallet while pretending she likes you. By the end of the night, you’re broke and she goes home with the excuse that she has to take care of her mother. I’ve read some horror stories where a guy unwittingly buys a bottle, gets a bill for an absurd sum, and isn’t allowed to leave until he pays up. Burly Russian types escort him to nearby ATMs to make the withdrawal.

The two girls were extremely friendly, asking questions interview-style, where during the previous two weeks I had trouble finding more than one girl who acted that way. I was skeptical. I didn’t want to discount the power of being with a friend, but their vibe seemed off. While walking to their club, the brunette hooked Luigi’s arm and the tall girl, who wasn’t at all attractive, hooked mine. Without any doubt in the world, I knew something was wrong.

“So what do you think of Riga?” the tall girl asked.

“It’s a weird place.”

“Why do you say that?”

“Well, you have the Latvians and the Russians, and they’re completely different people. It depends on where you go, I guess.”

“Where have you been so far?” she asked.

“Just to a couple clubs in the center.”

“Do you have a favorite?”

“Not yet.”

“What other countries have you been to?”

On and on it went. The conversation wasn’t natural because Eastern European women don’t ask rapid-fire questions. What’s funny was that she was talking to me the way I always tell guys not to talk to women.

Five minutes into the walk, I said, “Hey, Luigi, can I have a word with you for a minute?”

“Yeah buddy wants up?”

“This doesn’t feel right. I think we should go back.”

“Why, man? These girls are cool.”

“Nah, I think it’s a scam.”

“No, man, you’re just being paranoid. I’ve been to Riga twenty times, I’m not an idiot. Let’s just see where they want to go. Trust me, I’m not the last boy scout. I won’t let anything happen to us.”

He was a convincing little man. We resumed walking with the girls.

“So, where are we going?” I asked the tall girl.

“Don’t be so nervous,” she said. “We’re just going to have fun.”

“Does this place have a name?”

“Don’t worry about it!”

“Well, how far is it?”

“It’s close. Just a couple more minutes.”

She kept asking questions to keep my mind off the bar we were going to, but her awkward conversation style just made me even more suspicious. We made a left turn, a right, and then another right, which was the city equivalent of going three blocks to walk one.

“So do you know where this bar is or not? We’re walking in circles,” I said.

“Don’t be so nervous!” she said, but all my brain heard was be so nervous.

“Hey, Luigi, come here for a second,” I said, drawing him into another conference. “You know we just walked in a circle, right?”

“Yeah, it looks that way. Strange.”

“Look, this is a fucking scam. I’m 100% sure. We’re wasting our time.”

“It’s okay. Let’s just check out the place and if it’s a scam, we’ll leave.”

“So you want to continue wasting our night just to confirm it really is a scam? I have my ATM card on me and a lot of cash. I don’t feel comfortable at all.”

“Don’t worry, man.”

“Yeah, famous last words.”

“Look, they say it’s close. Let’s just check it out.”

“They’ve been saying its close for the past ten minutes.”

“We’ll just look at it from the front. I agree that it’s starting to smell like shit, but if it’s shit, we won’t go in.”

We went back to the girls. I didn’t even bother to put on a fake smile. Luigi really thought his girl was intensely attracted to him and walking us across town because she eventually wanted to fuck him.

Ten minutes later, we were approaching the worst area of the city, with no signs of civilization in sight. I stopped all conversation with the tall girl. If I got scammed on my own, having been honestly tricked, I’d take my licks and learn from it. But in this case I had seen the scam a mile away and was allowing a new friendship to suck me in way farther than I would have otherwise gone. I was putting my fate in Luigi’s hands.

“Alright, I’m going back,” I suddenly said. “Luigi, this is bullshit. We’ve been walking for twenty minutes and now we’re in a shit part of town. Even if the bar isn’t a scam, I don’t want to go.” Then, I added in a whisper, “I don’t even like the girl. I don’t want to fuck her. She’s not even cute.”

“So you’re going to leave me here alone?”

“You’re welcome to come with me if you want, but I’m not going to do something I don’t feel comfortable with.”

Luigi got stern with the girls. “Hey, ladies, this isn’t some bar where a bottle costs 500 euro, eh?”

Their cheesy smiles tried to assure him. For a guy who supposedly had so much Riga experience, I couldn’t believe that he was still indulging a scam that was going down word for word the way I had read about on the Internet (it wouldn’t be until the following night that he revealed he had been scammed multiple times in Riga).

“Okay, Roosh, I talked to the girls. They say it’s just three blocks down. How about we get into a taxi and look at it from the front? If it’s not good, we’ll drop them off and go back to club we were at.”

That sounded reasonable to me, especially since we would pick the cab. I hailed one on the street, but the driver didn’t speak English. We got in and the girls gave him directions in Russian. We had unwittingly given them complete control over the situation. They had told Luigi that the bar was only three blocks away, but just like on foot, we started going in circles. Either these girls were such amateurs that they had forgotten where the scam bar was, or they were deliberately trying to disorient us.

“I used to live here. This is a very bad area,” Luigi said.

“No shit,” I said. “Hey girls, do you know where this bar is or not?”

The pretty girl said to the taxi driver in Russian, “He doesn’t understand,” followed by a little laugh.

The taxi driver just smiled, understanding what was going on. The scam was definitely on and my heart started racing.

The taxi driver made a left turn onto a deserted road surrounded by abandoned lots and buildings. I went into fight-or-flight mode. This was how otherwise smart people get fucked, by putting their trust into someone else and letting their guard down at the exact moment they shouldn’t. It was my opportunity to escape, new friendship be damned.

I grabbed the cab driver’s chair and yelled, “Stop! Stop the fucking cab right here!”

The taxi driver was rattled and pulled off to the side. Everyone got out and Luigi and I paid the driver.

“Alright, I’m gone,” I said. “This is bullshit.”

“Don’t be nervous,” the tall girl said.

“Oh shut up. Both of you are scam artists.”

Luigi took me aside as we stood next to an empty lot by the side of the road. “Look,” he said, “this is probably a scam. I agree with you. I can smell the shit, but I want to see the shit to make sure.”

“You want to rub your nose in it? Are you fucking insane? Jesus Christ man, just give them your money now.”

“The bar is right around the corner,” the tall girl said.

“Let’s just go walk there,” Luigi said.

“No.”

“You don’t want to check it out?”

“No. Look at that corner—the burned-out building, the lack of lights. You really think there’s a bar there?”

Nothing was going to convince me at that moment.

Then the tall girl gently took my arm, telling me it would be fun, but I backed away, checking my pockets to make sure everything was still there. I looked at the girls and said, “Do you know how I know this is a scam? Because I’m calling you out, insulting you, yet you still want me to come with you. You’re total amateurs.”

I started walking away. Luigi yelled, “I beg you as a friend to stay and come with me.”

“You’re asking way too much for a two-hour friendship,” I said. “Even if you were my brother, I’d say no.”

“Okay, just wait for a second.”

I waited for a minute by myself, off to the side until he reluctantly joined me. The girls disappeared into the darkness.

“You know I saved your ass, right?” I said.

“Yeah I think so, but the brunette was so pretty. I was only thinking with my dick. I knew something was wrong when we went into that neighborhood. I used to live there and it’s not a place you want to be.”

“So why did you want to keep going?”

“Because I wanted to see the shit. I wanted to be 100% sure so I could cuss at the girls and call them bitch. I wanted the evidence in front of me.”

“I think in that case getting the evidence would have been too costly. Maybe there were guys waiting with bats.”

“No, I don’t think so.”

“How can you be sure?”

“Okay, let’s not talk about it anymore. Let’s go back to the club.”

We walked back to the Scandal club in Old Town. I bought a round of drinks, happy that we were out of danger. I looked at the crowd and was surprised that there were more girls than guys. It seemed strange for a Wednesday night.

“I can’t believe there are so many girls here,” I told Luigi.

“Think about it. It’s two a.m. on a Wednesday night. These girls don’t have jobs and they don’t go to school. They’re full-time bitch. Their job is to go out and take as much as they can from foreign men. The game is to fuck them without getting fucked.”

“That’s a new game for me.”

“Well not for me. I’m from Sicily. I learned very early that to get anything you have to be smart and fuck other people before they fuck you. This is the same thing, but with pussy.”

Twenty minutes after we arrived, who showed up but the two girls who tried to scam us. They had lied about not being able to get in. I saw the brunette flirting with the DJ, eventually writing her phone number for him on a piece of a paper. I was offended that she had considered us marks, stupid enough to fall for her amateur hour scam, while a local guy experienced the normal version of her. What got to me most was the acting—how a girl could make up a completely new persona to get paid.

As an experiment, I bought a drink for a girl Luigi said was “definitely bitch.” That one drink gave me twenty minutes of her attention, where she smiled at me, danced with me, and grinded against my cock. But when she realized that I wasn’t going to buy another drink, she went off to another foreign guy. Looking around, I noticed that all the girls were in pairs, which Luigi said was “the sign of the bitch.”

His lessons made it easy to categorize the girls. If I saw a pair of girls who were decked out in sexy clothes and heels, talking little between themselves and giving eye contact with everyone, they were bitches and could be bought in some way. But if the girls were smiling and dressing normal, hanging out in large groups with an occasional local guy, they were normal girls who had to be treated as such. Looking around Scandal, I saw no normal girls.

“The bitch,” Luigi said, “doesn’t care about you at all. Look at how I’m dressed, very simple, no? The bitch doesn’t know style. Look at that guy over there with the champagne bottle. He looks like shit but he has a hot girl, right? All they care about is what’s in your wallet.”

“But the normal girls don’t care about that.”

“Yeah they don’t, but good luck getting anywhere with them. You need to give up on meeting a normal girl who wants to talk like girls in America. That doesn’t exist here.”

He was presenting me with two extremes that lacked any middle ground. I didn’t want to believe him, but he was making a strong case.

Toward the end of the night there was a commotion at the bar. A large woman fell from her stool and rolled onto the floor. It was the fat girl Luigi had approached on the street. She was trashed. She walked up to him and he turned to me and gave a sour face as if saying, “This girl is gross.”

When I was ready to leave, Luigi said he was going to stay a bit longer. The next day he told me that he had taken the fat girl home and fucked her four times.

The following night we went to a bar I usually went to, a locals-only spot with girls who were tough to crack.

“Do you think American girls like money?” I asked.

“They do, but it’s in a different way. They just talk about your job or career. In America the girls ask about your work faster than anywhere else.”

I started to wonder if he was living a self-fulfilling prophecy. He’s going into every environment thinking that girls only wanted money, so of course he found only that. He was in one of the most notorious sex tourist cities in Eastern Europe, a place he knew was stacked with semi-pros and corrupted by money, with girls trying to run scams nightly, yet he begged for more. I asked him about the contradiction. Why did he keep coming if he hated it?

“Well here I can fuck every night,” he said.

So whatever his values were, being able to stick his dick into something was above finding a normal girl. I couldn’t say the same.

To continue my experiment from the previous night, I bought a young Latvian girl and her friend a shot. Like before, there was a burst of friendliness for a time, but then a male friend eventually whisked her away.

“See how buying these girls drinks makes a major difference?” Luigi said. “You got to buy it within the first few minutes, even with normal girls. They don’t like cheap men here.”

“I would never do this in America,” I said.

“Yes, because in America that doesn’t work. Find out what the girls want in the country you’re in, then give it to them.”

“What do the girls in this bar want?”

“A Latvian man. It’s obvious. Look around. Do you see any foreigners?”

“No, we’re the only ones.”

“Be smart. Why do you think that is? The girls in this place don’t want foreigners. In other countries, girls would die to get the chance to kiss your feet, and in the past it was like this here, too, but things have changed. Now you have to go to bitch clubs to get laid. That’s just how it is.”

I started seeing the futility of it all. Luigi was right. His words were matching almost perfectly with my experience, and the saddest truth of all was that the scammer girls would provide you with more action than the normal chicks.

“How about the fat girl you porked last night? What category would you put her in?”

“Desperate. Ugly girls here will fuck anything.”

“Why did you take her home?”

“I hate being alone. Every night I need a woman in my bed. I can’t even go out alone. I didn’t call you five times today because I want your dick but because I want to make sure you come out with me. I need to be with people, to talk to them. I don’t like it otherwise.”

Luigi was the first man I ever met who was so needy that it actually helped him take girls home. I thought I was persistent in staying out all night to get a girl, but Luigi simply wouldn’t go home until he found a girl. When we parted ways at around 4:00 a.m., he went to every other club that was open until he finally found a girl to take home. She didn’t fuck him, but he was satisfied nonetheless.

I didn’t see him on Friday. He met a girl from the Internet, had a cappuccino with her at the coffee shop, then took her home and fucked. When we met on Saturday night I asked him how she looked. “She was fat, but not as fat as the girl from the first night!”

For him it sounded like being with anyone was more important than being with a reasonable chick, but since those girls were giving him boners, I could argue that life was easier for Luigi than for myself.

We started at one of my favorite clubs. As expected, we were getting blown out left and right. I knew why, but it didn’t take away the sting of failure.

Luigi said, “In Latvia you have to sell the dream, the fantasy, that you’re her Prince Charming. Your energy has to be positive, you have to keep the drinks coming, and dance like it’s the last night in the world. Then you ask her to come to your apartment. If she says no, forget it, the dream ends and you must find another girl, because it must happen the same night. She maybe ask for money when you get to your place, but then you can bargain her down to a low price. If a girl asks for 20 lats, give it to her. She’s poor and has no money. That’s nothing to you.”

“That would be $40 to fuck a girl that for the most part will treat me like a normal guy instead of a john. That sounds reasonable, but I don’t know if I can do it.”

 “Even if you can do it, it’s not going to happen in this club. There is no bitch here. Look, last night I fuck a girl from only buying her a cappuccino, because she wanted to fuck a foreigner. Do you see any foreigners here? The girls don’t care about us. I know of another place.”

“What’s it called?”

“Essential.”

It’s impossible not to hear about Essential after setting foot in Riga. It used to be one of those foreign-friendly places where a girl wanted to meet an Italian dude for the night, but word on the street said that it was now scammer central. I made it a point not to go there.

I said, “I hear Essential is where all the prostitutes go.”

“Yeah but they love foreigners.”

“Prostitutes who love foreigners, how romantic.”

“Roosh, do you think you’re going to pick up in this club tonight?”

“No.”

“Can we at least check out Essential? It’s still early so if it sucks we can come back.”

I admit that I was at least curious about the club and wanted to see what it was all about. After paying $15 to get in, we walked into the main hall. Every single guy in there was a foreigner. Every single girl was a local. I felt like I was in Help in Rio, the infamous club where prostitutes went to get business from gringos. Essential might as well have been their Eastern European franchise.

In all fairness, some of the girls were rather cute. Out of the three categories of women in Riga, two were present: bitch and desperate. The desperate girls were easy to spot: they were fat and poorly dressed. The bitches were always sexy.

“Hey, look at that girl,” Luigi said, pointing towards a fat brunette. “On Badoo she asked me 150 lats to fuck her.”

“That’s $300. Are you sure she didn’t mean 1.50 lats?”

“No, I’m sure.”

“If she’s asking that much, I guess that means that there are actually guys who have paid. Fucking sex tourists.”

Luigi said, “This is my last visit here. Let’s get a drink and try to have a good time.”

By “let’s get a drink” he actually meant “how about if you buy me a drink?” I figured his funds were tight since he was always complaining about the high drink prices.

I handed him a vodka and Red Bull and he immediately started talking to a short blonde. She was a country girl with below-average looks. I put her in the desperate category. When they were still talking five minutes later, I knew he was in. All of a sudden I felt alone and in need to chat up a girl. Going out with Luigi I actually talked to very few girls because I was so busy talking to him.

I saw a tall blonde standing by the dance floor. She was wearing heels and a mini-skirt—a typical scammer chick, but she had a girl-next-door vibe with Princess Leia braided hair and a plain face. Because I knew all the scams, I felt immune.

I approached her and said, “You look like you speak English.”

“A little,” she said.

“Are you Russian or Latvian?”

“I’m Russian.”

“I’m actually learning Russian now. I’m studying one hour a day. It’s a hard language.”

She didn’t seem impressed and turned away slightly. I glanced over at Luigi. His girl was laughing. There were two foreign guys for every Latvian girl, so I had to try to make this one work.

I looked at her and said, “Do you want to dance?” She said yes.

After a couple minutes on the dance floor I put my hand on her hip, but she stepped back and made an X with her arms. Okay, relax, no problem. She eventually warmed up and we were dancing somewhat close.

I said, “This club is awful. I want to kill myself for coming here.”

“Do you want to go somewhere else?” she asked.

“Yes. I know a normal club we can go to.”

“Then let’s go.”

I felt like we were two lost souls, stuck in a club we both hated, extremely lucky to have found each other.

I can’t believe how naïve I was.

On Sunday night Luigi and I met at the TGI Fridays and ordered burgers. It was his last night in Riga.

“So what happened to you after I started talking to the girl?” Luigi asked.

“The bitch tricked me,” I said, “but first tell me what happened with the blonde.”

“I fucked her,” he laughed.

“How did it go down?”

“Remember last night I was telling you to sell these girls a dream? Well, my energy was really high and I was telling her that she was so beautiful and her hair was so soft. Then I said, ‘Look you’re a pretty girl. You like me, I like you, how about I give you 20 lat and we go to my place and hang out?’”

“And what did she say?”

“Of course she say yes. I told you, these girls are crazy about money. So I took her to my place, less than one hour after I start talking to her, and I fuck her. I even fuck her in the ass! It was so tiny.” He cupped his hands to accentuate the tightness.

“And you gave her the 20 lat?”

“No, I didn’t even give her! In the morning I could tell she wanted to ask me something, like she wants the money, but she didn’t ask and I didn’t bring it up.”

“What would you have done if she brought it up?”

“I would tell her that I didn’t have the money and I have to go to the ATM later. What is she going to do? Call the cops? These girls don’t have pimps.”

“So you scammed her. Amazing.”

“Yes, remember, I’m from Sicily.”

“So while you were scamming a chick, I was getting scammed.”

“Yes tell me what happened. I saw you talking to a nice blonde.”

 “I approached her and we started dancing. After a while we agreed to go somewhere else. I was going to take her to the Latvian club we were at earlier, since it’s normal and the music is good, but once we got outside, she wanted to take me to a bar in the opposite direction.”

“Uh oh.”

“Exactly,” I said. “She didn’t want to come to my bar because she didn’t trust me. I said, ‘Trust? We’re going to a public club, not my apartment.’ She insisted on going to her bar.

“I told her, ‘Look, don’t try to screw me. I’ve been in this city for a month and I know what goes on here. If you want to screw me then go right back inside and find another guy. There are many guys there who don’t care about getting screwed.’ I basically told her I wasn’t an idiot and that she was wasting her time if she was trying to con me. She got offended that I’d think of her that way. She stopped walking and then our faces got real close, like we were about to kiss.”

“So she was sincere?”

“Yes. I was convinced she wasn’t a scammer and that she really liked me. Either that or she was the best actress I have ever met. We walked and walked, just like with those two chicks from our first night out. She kept saying it was close, like they did. I was getting a little anxious, but not too much because I believed she was real. Then we finally arrived at her club. I walked in and it looked fine—nice bar, DJ, big dance floor—but there were only two people in there.

“I went up to the bar and asked the bartender how much a Finlandia vodka cost. Usually it costs 2.50 lats, even in the good clubs. Well, he showed me the menu…8 lats. $16 for a shot of average vodka. I went back to the girl and said, ‘Do I look stupid?’ She didn’t answer. I raised my voice. ‘Look at me! Do I look fucking stupid? I told you not to screw me, and now you bring me to this fucking scam bar. What the hell is wrong with you?’”

“So she is bitch?”

“Yes, she is bitch. She broke down and started crying. I couldn’t tell if she was faking. She said, ‘I feel ashamed.’ I told her, ‘If you want to come with me to the normal club, we can go now. Yes or no?’ She didn’t give me an answer, wanting to talk instead. I could tell she was trying to stall, that she wasn’t really attracted to me, so I left. It was almost 5:00. I thought it was hopeless, but I didn’t give up. I went to another Latvian club and met a thirty-year-old who was sitting alone at the bar.”

“Alone, that’s like a jackpot.”

“Yes. I got her to my place, but we didn’t fuck. I couldn’t get her clothes off.”

“At least the night wasn’t a total loss.”

“Yes, it was. What happened last night was something I would rather not have experienced. I was being genuine to a woman that I was attracted to, wanting to have a good time, and she was acting the whole time like she was starring in a movie. She saw me as a piece of shit. The whole thing was completely fake. This whole city is fake. I don’t know why you keep coming back.”

“Because I see them as the bitch they are. In this city one person is always doing the scamming. So if you’re not scamming her, which last night you were not, then you get scammed.”

“I understand that, but I don’t want to be in a place where that’s the reality. I prefer the fantasy world of women wanting to have sex with you just because they like your sense of humor or personality. My culture is different.”

“I already told you I’ve been burned here many times. One time I take home a girl and when I come out of the bathroom she made two drinks. She made a toast ‘to our health.’ All I remember next is waking up the next morning with the worst headache of my life. She stole my phone and passport. Another time some guy on the street stole my passport, and then there was the girl who stole my laptop.”

“Jesus,” I said.

“Yeah but it’s part of the game. You fuck her before she fucks you. I’m good at this. Well, at least now I am.”

“You were walking directly into a trap on Wednesday night, dragging me with you. I saved your ass,” I said with a laugh. “Are you sure you’re good at this?”

“Last night I was good!” he said, smiling broadly.

When our burgers came I realized why Luigi loved Riga so much: he was a scammer himself. He got joy out of tricking girls at their own game, even though he had lost the game many times. For him the fun wasn’t just fucking a girl, but tricking her in the process. He made me feel prudish in that I wanted to be honest and just have some fun sex without any scams, tricks, or money attached.

“So what do you want to do tonight?” he asked.

“Sleep. I’m tired.”

“When I walked by Scandal there were some people inside. Let’s just go for a drink.”

“Oh, no, I’m completely done,” I said.

“This is my last night here and you’re going to say goodbye to me in front of an American burger place? Let’s have one drink to our friendship and that’s it. Come on. I don’t want to be alone. Oh, and let me tell you some more reasons why I love America and the American dream…”

Twenty minutes later we were walking to the club. I already knew how the rest of the night would go.

Orgasm Or Money

After Luigi left, I saw Riga in a different light. I felt like every responsive girl was playing some sort of angle and wanted to get to know the monetary part of me instead of the real me. It seemed pointless even to try.

But my dick. It wanted to fuck something. It didn’t care that whatever I fucked would probably try to scam me. It needed release inside a real vagina.

I went into a quiet coffee shop for a couple hours to catch up on work. I walked out late, around 11:00, and stood in front of the door to zip up my jacket and put on my scarf. It was a Tuesday night, not the best day to go out. A girl with brown pigtails walked by, giving me eye contact. In an instant my hand went up and made the universal “wait a moment” sign. It took about three more seconds for an opening line to enter my head.

“Do you know a good place to go on Tuesday night?” I asked.

“Actually, I could ask you that. I don’t usually go out on this day.”

I eliminated her as a scammer since she was alone (they always operate in pairs), but something just wasn’t right about a pretty girl walking alone trying to find a place to go out in her own city. Even so, I decided that as long as I controlled most of the variables, I’d come out on top.

“There’s a bar near where I live that usually has people,” I said. “How about we go there for a drink?”

She agreed. She didn’t hook my arm or grab my hand, a telltale sign of a scammer, but my guard was still up.

“What do you think of Riga?” she asked.

“It’s hard to find a normal girl here. In a lot of the places I’ve been to the girls are working, trying to trick guys. I know there are a lot of sex tourists here who don’t mind that, but I just want a nice conversation.”

I told her about the scammer clubs and she said she had never been to them before. I wanted to think she was telling the truth, but I had decided not to believe a single thing that came out of a Latvian girl’s mouth.

My apartment was next door to the bar. I told her that I wanted to drop off my laptop bag.

“You can meet me at the bar or come in with me.”

She decided to come in, which I thought was peculiar. She had only knew me for ten minutes. How did she know I wasn’t going to rape her?

I couldn’t help but ask once inside my place. “How do you know I’m a good guy?”

“You have an honest face. You seem like a nice person.”

She unzipped her coat to reveal a thin body. I brushed my teeth and changed my clothes. When she saw me shirtless, she gasped, “Oh my god!”

“What?”

“You’re so… hairy. It’s amazing. I love hairy men, but I never meet them. It’s hard to find that here. You’re like a bear.”

“Not many girls like it.”

“No, it’s very nice. I have hair, too. Do you want to see?”

Was she about to show me her vagina?

“Yeah, sure,” I said.

She slipped one side of her dress off and showed me an armpit full of hair. I can’t say I was expecting that.

“A lot of guys like it,” she said.

“I find that hard to believe, but okay.”

Everything else about her checked out, so at that moment I still thought I could bang her. During the sex act I wouldn’t even see her pit hair, but I wished she hadn’t shown me. Curiosity killing the cat, and all that.

Before leaving for the bar I showed her a bottle of champagne I had in the fridge. It was my afterparty move since finding out that girls in this part of the world went crazy for bubbly.

At the bar we sat on a couch, getting to know each other a little. As I told her some of my recent travel experiences, I noticed that she was much more comfortable with silences than I was, something I had noticed about Eastern Europeans in general.

I said, “We Americans have a need to talk constantly. When we hear a silence, we get this urge to fill it. I know it’s something that’s a product of my culture, but I can’t help feeling that silences are weird.”

“So everyone just keeps talking?” she asked.

“Yes. It’s a little different if you’re in a big group. Then it turns into a competition to talk. People have a list of things that they want to share and then, at the hint of silence, they blurt them out. So everyone is talking about their own thing, but hardly anyone is giving feedback to what was just said.”

“That’s stupid. There’s nothing wrong with silence. Sometimes you can understand a person more with silence than with words.”

“I’m starting to see that here.”

I told her that the biggest challenge for me was understanding a culture as quickly as possible, not only so I can write about it, but also so that I could get along with “the people.”

“When I go to a country,” I said, “I like to notice what’s different. How human beings, even though they’re the same animal, have a wide range of culture, beliefs, and behaviors.”

“So you see a lot that’s different, but what have you noticed that is the same?”

My mouth opened, but no words came out. I wanted to say sex, but that can actually be quite different. I mean, the act of sticking your dick into a woman is the same, but the moment leading up to it and what a girl does during the sex act can vary widely.

“You know, I don’t really know,” I said. “That’s the first time a girl has ever stumped me with a question. I’ll have to think about that.”

She smiled as if to say, “See, I’m not a typical Latvian girl.”

She said she was only 26, but I was sure she was hovering near 30. Earlier she had mentioned having a boyfriend, so I followed up to see what the deal was.

“I live with my boyfriend,” she said. “He’s 55. He’s a famous artist who has published a lot of work.”

“He doesn’t mind you going out alone?”

“He doesn’t care. Our relationship is open. I think the best relationships are open, or else the passion dies and it gets boring.”

I started to relax, convinced that she was just a horny chick out for an easy lay and not running a scam. It helped that she wasn’t talking on the phone to coordinate with a potential accomplice and that I was in a bar I had been to many times before. All seemed right in the world, except for the armpit hair.

When I came back with a second round of drinks, our faces got quite close and she kissed me. Then she asked, “Do you want to fuck?”

Trick question?

“Maybe,” I replied.

“50 lat.”

Oh, come on.

I maintained my composure. “Look, I don’t want to waste your time, but I’m not going to pay for sex. You should move on to another guy.”

“I’m just joking,” she said, kissing me again. “I like you.”

My shields were now fully up. I figured her Plan B was to get me so turned on that I couldn’t help but pay, and that was exactly what she tried to do.

We talked for another half hour and she didn’t bring up money again. She was actually an interesting girl, raised in the school of hard knocks where she tried to take advantage of every situation. I wanted to proceed with the interaction, not necessarily because I was dying to bang her, but because I wanted to see what would happen. As long as I watched her like a hawk, I was straight.

We went back to my apartment to open the champagne. We sat on my couch and she started stroking my dick through my jeans. She took off her dress and sat in her bra and panties. I wasn’t surprised to see a carpet around her vagina. With her panties on it looked like a mustache. I still had a boner, but I can’t say I enjoyed the hairiness. It was more novel and weird than gross, like something out of an old porn movie.

She went to the bathroom and asked if I wanted to watch.

“Why would I want to watch?” I asked.

“I don’t know, some guys like it. They pay me 5 lats.”

She came back and I asked if she normally tried to get money for sex.

“I only did this one other time, with an English guy. He was a doctor and very nice. I think he was a virgin.”

“Only one time?”

“I swear. But I’ll have sex with you for 50.”

“I’ve never paid for sex in my life,” I said. “I want to see how long I can go until then. Tonight isn’t the night I’m going to do it, sorry.”

“You never paid for sex in America? Girls don’t ask for money?”

“No, they don’t ask for money. If a girl likes me and my personality, we have sex. There is a song that goes, ‘The best things in life are free.’”

“Well, that’s stupid. They should ask, because if you ask you get to have sex and you get money, too. It’s normal here to ask. A girl should always get the best deal possible.”

“I don’t know if that’s really sad or really smart.”

“But I like you, so if you don’t want to pay then just give me an orgasm.”

 “And how do you want me to do that?”

“Lick my pussy.”

I looked at her vagina mustache. She moved her panties over so I could see a little bit of pink. She started playing with herself and making fake moaning noises.

“Is there a third option?” I asked.

“No, orgasm or money.”

“Maybe my dick will give you an orgasm.”

“And if not, you’ll fall asleep, and I won’t have orgasm or money. I’ve learned that a man must give you one of the two upfront, so no matter what, I get something out of the sex.”

“Yeah, I’m never coming back to Latvia.”

I turned on the television and we watched some music videos. When she realized I wasn’t going to give her orgasm or money, she started telling me a sob story. The government had just levied a 1,000 euro tax on her. Her parents were suffering in some shack. Her boyfriend didn’t give her passion. She started crying and said it was my fault that her parents were poor.

“Why is it my fault?” I said, unmoved.

“Because your parents have a pension. Your pensions fucked up our economy!”

“Neither of my parents have a pension. They work for themselves. Good try, but it’s not my fault.”

“Okay, fine, but help me. Give me some money.”

She was crying and shrieking, doing the whole bit. There were actual tears, but the only way I could have been more disaffected was if I had been snacking on some popcorn.

“Why don’t you ask your boyfriend for money?”

“He won’t give it to me!”

Smart man, I thought.

Then she leapt up and snatched 25 lat that was sitting on my dresser.

I grabbed it back and said, “Look, I’m not a charity. I’m not giving you money. I told you an hour ago to go find another guy. Go to Scandal where guys will pay you to fuck.”

“But I like you. I’m scared that if I have sex with you I’ll fall in love with you.”

“Right. Hold on, let me call the Academy to nominate this performance.”

“What?”

“Never mind.”

It’s interesting that telling a whore you don’t pay for sex doesn’t discourage her. She thinks she’s more seductive than the other whores and can get you to open your wallet. Whores probably think a guy like me is just being coy.

As she put on her dress, I heard a crumpling sound and instinctively reached for her pocket, thinking she had stolen something. Inside were four condoms.

“You’ve only done this once before?” I asked. “It seems like you’re mighty prepared.”

“Okay, well, tonight I wanted to make some money. I’m just in bad situation right now.”

“Why don’t you get a job?”

“There are no jobs.” What she actually meant was, “I don’t want to work in a coffee shop. Tricking guys for sex is a whole lot easier.”

The whole charade was starting to bore me. My dick had been soft for quite a while. If we weren’t going to fuck, I wanted her to leave me in peace so I could jerk off.

“I think it’s time for you to go,” I said. “I want to shower and do some other things.”

“Go ahead and shower, I’ll wait,” she said.

“No, that’s okay. It will be a while.”

“Do you want to hang out tomorrow with me and my boyfriend? We can show you some art.”

“Sorry, but I have plans.”

She persisted in seeing me again, in what I think may have been a genuine desire, but I’ll never know for sure.

The thing I had been hating most about Latvia was the acting. I thought I was good at detecting lies, but Latvian girls were on a level I hadn’t seen before. I didn’t know what was real or not, so I assumed they were acting about everything. It wasn’t a good way to build any sort of connection or normal relationship, but at least I wouldn’t be surprised.

After she left, I scanned my apartment for missing items. Nothing was gone. Then I thought about what she had said, how it was stupid for American girls not to ask for money before sex. Was it possible that the sexual culture in America and other Western countries is fantasy, and that the best move for women was to get as much as she could out of a guy? Or was she just lying about Latvian culture to make me feel better about giving her money?

It makes logical sense for a girl to get paid for something she was going to do for free anyway, but it would change everything—the dynamic, the game, and even the sex act. To me it’s unbearable to think a girl might be spending time with me only because of money, something that isn’t an inherent part of me. If she was into me solely for my looks, I’d more be okay with it. I wonder if I’m being insecure for thinking this way, but I’d rather play in the fantasy world than in a place like Latvia.

V

Riga City Guide

After leaving Riga, I read an article in the Telegraph called “Latvian girls urged to say ‘no’ to sex tourists.” A non-profit organization in Latvia received support from twenty businesses to “stop sexual terrorism,” their marketing term for sex tourism. The campaign aimed to demonize foreign men who take advantage of innocent Latvian girls that not only accept money from men but steal from foreigners using a variety of scams. In other words, it’s the man’s fault, not the woman’s.

The problem was that the campaign began in 2007, a full four years before I visited. If things were so bad that they had to attack “sexual terrorism” back then, you can only imagine how much further the situation has deteriorated. When you have city institutions telling women not to interact with foreigners via an organized marketing campaign, no one should be surprised that I received ice cold responses from normal Latvian girls.

What once was good is now spoiled. There are sex tourists all over Riga and it has a strong capitalist feel thanks to chain stores, professionally designed shops, and flashy menus with colorful pictures. Excluding scammer chicks, the center of Riga has no edge or rawness, nothing unexplored. You won’t stumble onto any pleasant surprises. We’ve arrived too late to the party.

Bad news travels slower than good news. You can still find stories on the Internet of Latvian girls showering foreign guys with attention, but just like in Prague, another destination ruined by foreigners, times have changed. Riga is the second European city I know of that has been completely ruined by foreign men. The shock of it all is the speed of ruination. It took Prague ten years to become shit, but in Riga it only took five. There are two reasons: the insanely low price of airfare to Riga ($30–40) and its small size. Riga hasn’t been able to absorb the massive invasion of horny Englishmen and Italians. Those who are late to the party are reluctant to say it sucks because it would suggest that they failed, so the myth of Riga and Latvian women stubbornly prevails.

Sometimes it’s hard to explain why some cities are chosen above others by tourists, just like how you can’t predict why some Internet memes become popular. Tallinn is being affected by sex tourism to a smaller degree, while Lithuania is only slightly damaged. Riga, though, is beyond help. The fact that there is an extensive scammer infrastructure and designated spots where girls go for the sole purpose of taking money from foreigners means it’s not a place you should be going to. Even if you do happen upon a normal bar, the Latvian girls will ignore you because they’ve been taught by the establishment that you’re a sexual terrorist. Only desperate girls and women past their prime will give you the time of day.

If you go to Latvia, for the love of god don’t party in Riga’s Old Town. Consider going to another city altogether. A local guy I trust told me the easiest places to pull will be second-tier cities or in the Riga suburbs. The idea is to go to places where foreigners are a novelty and considered more valuable than local men.

Lodging

There’s a large supply of apartments to rent in Old Town. I used Apartments Riga (http://www.apartments-riga.com). Other options include:

·         Stay in Riga: http://www.stayinriga.com

·         Lilija Plus: http://www.lilarealty.lv

·         Agency Stes: http://www.stes.lv

The rates are reasonable, starting at around 40 euros a night for a short stays. Long-term stays will drop that rate down by half. The best thing about Riga is easiness of getting affordable tourist lodging.

Daytime

There are three malls that will offer opportunities for day game, especially during the winter when street game is of little use. The biggest is Galleria Riga, located at Dzirnavu 67. A smaller mall that has more people because of its central location is Galerija Centrs (Audēju 16). Finally, there’s Stockmann (13. Janvāra iela 8), located near the bus station. Even though Stockmann is the smallest of the three and more like a department store than a mall, it had the prettiest girls I saw in Riga.

Your best chance of success at day game is in the grocery stores. Simply pick up a strange food item and ask a Latvian girl what it is, followed by questions about typical Latvian cuisine.

A reliable hangout is the Double Coffee chain of coffee shops. It’s not a good place for pickups since girls never go there alone, but the food and drinks are tasty and reasonably priced. My favorite thing about Riga was the Double Coffee location that was open all night on the weekends (near McDonald’s in the center). Alcohol is also served, making it a suitable date venue.

Nighttime

I don’t know how useful this nightlife guide will be if you’re going during the summer. Many people have told me that the Riga scene changes rapidly, meaning that you should gather some intelligence on the ground instead of just following my recommendations.

One of the best spots is Piens (Aristida Briana 9), located a short taxi ride from the city center. The sex ratio is great and the girls are pretty. Since this is a hip place where artists hang out at, you’ll encounter cliques and people who relish their mini-socialite status. Some attitude from the women is present, but it’s manageable. There are few foreigners and no scammer girls.

The action at Piens starts on Wednesday and stays busy up to the weekend. The only problem is that you may not be able to get in since you’re a foreigner. Your best bet is to go solo as early as you can and refrain from speaking English at the door unless spoken to. If you can’t get in, try the club next door, which opens starting on Thursdays.

Moon Safari (Kramu 2) is a small club that is a favorite of Spanish exchange students, including Spanish girls. This means it’s possible in Riga for you to get your Spanish flag if you’re able to perform magic and extract her from her mammoth social circle. I don’t know what’s happening with Spanish girls, but they’re sinking fast by becoming fat, sloppy, and masculine like American girls. I don’t think you’ll be more tempted by Spanish beauty than the local talent. Skip Moon Safari unless you’re curious about the Spanish scene.

Pulkvedim (Peldu 26/28), also known as the Colonel, is a decent scam-free club filled with mostly Latvians that consistently has a crowd starting on Wednesday nights. However, there are three problems worth mentioning. First, the circular bar keeps the talent spread out, meaning there’s no ideal spot to stand. Second, it’s loud as hell when you get close to the dance floor. Third, the girls are completely closed off to foreigners. To pull here, you’ll have to work the crowd until really late when a girl is drunk and isolated from her friends, but at that time all the sausage comes in from other clubs. I really wanted to like this place, but it offered a very low ROI.

Kalku Vartu (Kalku 11) was my favorite club because it had a high ratio of females to males and no scams. The bar also provided easy logistics for approaching girls that were ordering drinks. The problem is that the girls are closed off to foreigners, like all other normal spots, and a lot of girls come here with their boyfriends. Wait until the end of the night on a weekend (around 4:00) to approach in earnest, because girls definitely become more open as the night goes on.

The Club (Kungu str 8) is a mostly Russian club that you might have trouble getting into, depending on the night. I think it’s slowly turning into a scam club because there were a ton of foreign dudes when I went (where there are foreign dudes, there are scammer chicks). On the plus side, the Russian girls were definitely hotter and more feminine than Latvian girls.

Scandal (Kalku 12). During the week this club has scammer chicks, but on the weekend it’s only semi-scam. Every night has male clientele that’s predominately foreign. The venue is small, but not half bad, with good music and fair prices. Within a year or so I predict this venue will be a full-blown scam spot.

Essential (Skolas iela 2). This is the epicenter for scammer girls, their go-to venue when they want to trick foreign dudes. If a local girl wants to make money off a foreigner, she comes here, meaning that no self-respecting local girl would be caught dead in this place. Over 90% of the guys are foreigners. While you can definitely pick up a girl here for free, especially the ones below a 7 rating, the hot girls will come at a price that’s not stated upfront. If you’ve ever been to Help in Rio (now closed, may it rest in peace), it has a similar, though more subtle, vibe. It’s open only on the weekend.

Push (Tērbatas 2) is a predominately Russian club that shouldn’t be hard for you to get into. It has a solid sex ratio and quite a few attractive Russian women. The vibe is relaxed and the prices are fair. The main room is loud but the side room with hip-hop is more conducive to conversation. There are some foreign dudes, but fewer than the scam spots. This is the best club if you want to meet a Russian girl, while Kalku Vartu is the best for Latvians.

Coyote Fly (Palasta 3) is an upscale club that has mostly Latvians. It had the hottest girls I saw in Riga. The only problem is that they have strict face control against foreigners (I was able to get in only through a local who knew the bouncer). Once inside, I noticed that there were almost no foreign guys, meaning no scammers. The girls aren’t easy, but they’re pretty and normal. Oddly enough, the best spot to meet girls is in front of the coat check desk. If you don’t have any connections, the best thing is to come really early, around 10:00 p.m.

četri Balti Krekli (Vecpilsētas 12). Many local guys recommended this spot to me, but I was unable to make it there. It supposedly has older women that are receptive to foreigners, so you may want to pop in for a visit.

Riga has a ton of small bars that are bad for meeting women but decent for taking them out on dates, such as Cuba Café (Janniela 15), Celsijs (Mazu Moneta 5), and Krogs Aptieka (Maza Miesnieku 1). One bar that stood out was Greenwood Bar (Krāmu 3), which is just large enough to do some bar-style approaches, but only when it’s crowded on the weekends. The best spot is at the bar right off the small dance floor.

If you have a Latin background and know how to salsa, you may want to check out Salsa Riga (http://www.salsariga.lv). For more nightlife ideas, visit Riga Life (http:/www.riga-life.com) and Meeting.lv (http://www.meeting.lv).

The Bottom Line

Riga’s official tourism motto is “Live Riga,” but I recommend it be changed to “Riga Is Full Of Women Who Scam Men.” The city itself is nice if you want to take a few pictures of buildings, but if you dive into it a bit further, you enter a house of mirrors where you must read between the lines of every interaction with women to prevent being taken for a ride.

I encountered places in Brazil where the girls were prostitutes, but at least there it was obvious. What you saw was what you got. In Latvia, the girls con you by hiding their true intentions until the very end, using sharp acting skills to make you believe they really like you when all they want is to get paid.

Do yourself a favor by not banging Latvia. If you insist on going, skip Riga and head to the second-tier city of Daugavpils, but why bother when two superior countries, Estonia and Lithuania, are so close by. I can’t advise any man to visit a country where the local women are hell-bent on running scams on tourist men. Even if they’re not scammers, they’ll give you the cold shoulder since they have been brainwashed that guys like you are sex terrorists. Don’t waste your time or money.

For more tips on picking up European women, visit my web site:

http://www.rooshv.com

To see other titles in the Bang Travel series,

click the following link:

http://www.bangguides.com/travel/