Hi Pete, I am quite reluctant to do it because by now it's crystal clear to me, and perhaps many others, that any trip report that goes beyond the tritest and most boring stats, such as the price of a restaurant or a taxi home and the kind of fashion preferred by young women in downtown bars, is bound to express nothing else than a particular member's view of a particular number of locations at a particular point in time. Nothing wrong with a trip report of this kind: it can be interesting, evocative, entertaining, but far from being "informative" (in the purest information theory sense - a specific event giving a highly uncertain outcome carries very little information).pete98146 wrote:Publicduende......would love to see a lengthy post about Medellin! How do you like it?
TwoBrains and I were in Davao at the same time this last December. TwoBrains didn't like Davao much, I absolutely loved it. On any one of those days, Davao had exactly the same amenities functioning, the same bars open, the same girls strolling the streets or logging into a dating site. Yet, I guess there are more people here ready to shrug their shoulders and debate on Davao being such an impenetrable mystery of a city, than acknowledge the simple truth that I am not TwoBrains and TwoBrains is not me. Every one of us has completely different backgrounds, personalities, qualities, expectations and prejudices, which makes it all too obvious that Davao is literally a different thing for each and every one of us, especially in the delicate field of human (and emotional/sexual) relationships with another bunch of real people, the Pinays.
I remember a seldom-posting member, Will N Dowd, making quite a splash a few months ago, with his uber-juicy account of his two weeks in the Philippines, in Davao if I don't go wrong. I do remember he went on making an impressive list of the girls he approached, or was approached by, complete with grades. There was no doubt he had the time of Riley there, and his account was charged enough to re-ignite the idea of Davao as a dating paradise, where every foreigner is welcomed by three young women ready to mingle and every trotting jeepney is ripe with exotic beauties ready to flirt with the only white Caucasian on board. It probably lasted until the next trip report came out and put the same city, the same people, places and nightlife into a wildly different perspective. Standing by Pavlov's law, it would appear that the latest trip report being published is the truth. Even if we wanted to average out and take a summary result, we will still have a poor outcome as we cannot choose the statistical sample of people visiting and reporting back. For that one to work, we should be sending to Davao as many 38-years old studs like Will N Dowd as happy-go-lucky married Italians like me, as divorcees with beer belly and post-mid-life crisis...you get me.
So...to each his own.
Medellin for me is a great Lat Am metropolis that is getting better by the year. Every year it seems to develop its own identity and, as a corollary, need less and less to borrow from the stereotypes of other southern US and latin american cities. My wife Monica hadn't been here for 3.5 years and she could feel the stark difference in urban development: more shiny new shopping malls, more spotless and classy bars, more exotic restaurants (especially Chinese and Japanese), a new bus-based transport system (still a bit work in progress, if you ask me). Even though I had no ground to make comparison, Monica reckons the girls are better dressed, younger (on average) and even better looking. She put the latter down to a bunch of new surgical and semi-surgical procedure to round bums, smoothen skin and taper limbs that have apparently hit the clinics in the last few years, and became affordable to a larger number of young professional women.
I have given this site http://www.pegateya.com/ciudad/medellin/index.php a huge number of times already. Just browse through the hundreds of photos of Medellin venues and their audience: those are the real people crowding Luxury, Karma, Spazio44, the fincas and the fondas. Nobody is fooling you there. How those girls behave with foreigners like me or you guys, it's a different ball game. I am having a great time, as I have talked, chit-chatted, with some raunchy or sensual overtones in some cases, with more than 30 young women in a few days of partying. Yet I wouldn't put that down to anything else than being thrusted not only into Monica's old social circle - her ex colleagues, high school and uni classmates - but also that of her cousins, with ages ranging from 18 to 35. The key thing I can conclude is: ensure you have a trusted friend or friends who can quickly introduce you to their female friends of acquaintances - it can only be downhill from there.
Another thing I couldn't help noticing is that, as I said before, the specimen of young gringo waving the dollar just won't cut anymore with the Medellin girls, and not even with the boys for that matter. Talking their talk and dancing their dances, coming across as seriously interested in blending into the local cultural colours is far more important than nationality, mother tongue, age (up to a certain limit, obviously) and ethnicity. I did observe the few foreigners I could see enjoying some success in approaching and flirting with multiple girls in a venue. They were generally young (no older than, say, 35), very decent looking and, despite the noise, I could hear them speaking fluent Spanish (perhaps they were all Argentinian or Spanish who knows!). I believe they were the kind of young men who wouldn't have problems dating anywhere else in the world. If it can be of relief, in this particular sample I didn't notice any sign of those overcomplicated PUA methods. Just normal to decent men buzzing around decent to hot young ladies.
How would I have fared if Monica and her platoon of cousins hadn't put me in the heart of their social situations, each and every night, and what would I have done if I hadn't always been in the sweet company of Monica (herself quite the hottie)? I have no clue, and I am in no position to give advice on a situation I simply wasn't in. The only thing I can imagine is that, being with my wife hence patently unable to flirt or by flirted on, took away all of the sexual tension and probably allowed me to enjoy the different conversations more naturally, without fear of being misunderstood or penalised. It also helped that, probably thanks to an extra aguardiente or two, some of the girls seemed happy to entertain topics strongly going into the raunchy or sensually/sexually charged. One of Monica's cousins told me her favourite position when she has anal sex with her hubby, I had a round of answers to the "what's the colour of your underwear right now" (with ensuing raunchiness about who wasn't wearing any underwear at all), and so on. Just plain light-hearted fun, the Colombian way.
As you can see, I have tried conveying some impressions on my experience of Medellin, very positive indeed, and yet completely tuned on my personal situation: married but perky, dragged around by my wife and her young family members, and overwhelmed by people, either gender and all ages, keen to know me, embrace me, chat with me, whether out of genuine interest, curiosity or even simple politeness.
I have written quite a lot, and yet I feel I have added absolutely nothing to HA's "collective consciousness". Oh well, at least I can hope to have been entertaining
