The only problem was the expensive course I had to follow. I couldn’t afford it so I managed to pretty much blackmail the taxi company to pay for half my education if I volunteered to quit my job. A trade which basically saved me about 1700 dollars at the time and the taxi company paying for an employee that didn’t work. Corporate laws are a bit different (read better) in Northern Europe and the employee is well protected from being fired.
I took a job at a local bread factory/bakery and worked a three shift job packing all kinds of bakery products off the conveyer belt. In hindsight I can barely believe I worked there for nearly six months. A truly depressing, dead end job but hell, it paid the bills and I had time to study and follow the course.
After a while I got laid off and received unemployment money again (70% of your net salary per month). I sat at home for almost a year before I got a big break when a government recruitment office gave me an internship at a company that designed and manufactured machines. After six months they gave me a year contract. I became quite popular at the company for being able to do the job even though I didn’t have the academic education everyone thought was required for the job. I got into the strategic buying department and went about buying parts for machines from all over the world – though since I was an assistant, I never got to travel.
It was the second time my social skills got a reasonable boost. The first of course being a blabbermouth taxi driver but that was mostly to score a bigger tip.
Around then I was also a fanatic at trading stock options and spent a lot of time and money on that, dreaming of what a fantastic lifestyle I would have once I had some big money to spend. Instead of buying cool clothes, going to bars and socializing I was wasting my precious time and money on bad investments and a relationship that wasn’t going anywhere. It ended in a fight and her packing up her stuff and leaving. Never saw her again and good riddance. It was a 3.5 year mistake.
Well, at least my investments were going not all that bad. Like any half-assed investor I made some money and lost some too. At one point, though, it looked like it might all have been worth it. For years I’d been anticipating the big crash in 2008, and bought lots of put options, that means you make money when the market goes down. Options are high risk/high reward investments. But I didn’t realize just how bad it would be, so when the stock market had already bounced up and down a few times and I was becoming disappointed in the outcome and was afraid the market might even go up again and I would lose all my invested money, I sold everything, clearing a cool 10,000 Euros profit. It was a reasonable profit considering the original money I put in my account but then disaster struck and the Dutch stock market crashed in an all out panic. I could have made 150,000 Euros if I’d held on for just three or four weeks longer.
I wasn’t cut out for this and my hopes and dreams of having an easy life went out the door and it depressed me for months. Of course I had to smile at work and couldn’t talk about it. It was this depressing time that planted a seed in my mind about wanting to leave everything behind. I just didn’t know how to give form to my escapism needs.
For years I thought that if I saved enough money or became rich the hot girls and successful life would come to me. This dream was now gone and then one day I saw some poor-looking guy with a really hot girl on the back of his bicycle. They were laughing and having fun and suddenly reality hit me in the face. It wasn’t money that was keeping me from success; it was me and my social behavior. I wasn’t an easy-talking or popular guy – I’ve always been very self-conscious and reacted way too much to other people’s opinions about me, arguing every time I disagreed with someone, taking comments about me far too seriously, virtually unable to take a joke. Although I was able to get a girl from time to time, the periods in between girlfriends were full of depression and low self esteem. I was way too hung up on following “the rules” and my happiness depended on having a girlfriend and living happily ever after.
A colleague told me about the trips he had made to India and some other countries and I was briefly introduced to an intern who had just traveled for six months in Australia. I remember seeing him only once or twice. I didn’t to talk to him much but his cool and laid back appearance intrigued me. Dare I say, I was fucking jealous of this young and confident surfer dude type of guy. Jealousy is a very rare emotion for me so it hit me hard.
Suddenly I became interested in traveling and remembered that in the ten previous years my only vacations were one weekend in Paris in 2002 with a girlfriend and two weeks in Greece in 2007 with my long term girlfriend. Every other time my summer holidays rolled around I was either single or my lousy friends backed out of our plans to go somewhere. Two trips in ten years: that sounds really pathetic and it was. I spent my vacation days at home surfing the internet or watching movies. Did I already mention that for years I was a major pussy by not even wanting to listen to people telling me to travel by myself? The thought of traveling alone had horrified me for nearly a decade but now I decided to do something about it.
In the summer of 2008 I signed up for a group tour to India and Nepal and went there with about twenty other Dutch people for twenty-four days. At least I wouldn’t be totally alone. The trip was amazing and disastrous at the same time. I got so sick that I lost 25 pounds and by the end looked like a concentration camp survivor. But despite my terrible attempts of getting with a few girls in my group and all the horror of being sick for weeks and being forced to keep travelling in stinking hot buses and disgusting trains in the most unhygienic country in the world, I still got a taste of travelling and I liked it a lot. I discovered that other cultures fascinated me.
After spending a month recovering, I was back working at the office. Well, working is an overstatement; most of the time I had a pretty easy life there. The company was doing poorly because of the financial crisis, though in my opinion it was mostly due to bad management. In the two and a half years I worked there we had six re-organizations and I survived them all. I had five different bosses and I managed to get a lot of stuff out of them, something most colleagues didn’t appreciate, especially the ones who’d been working there for years but were too dumb or timid to profit from their job. I was getting paid a great salary, got a suitcase, a laptop, and company phone, bought myself a good car and a quality suit – but most importantly, for the first time in my life I felt like a somebody instead of a nobody.
My social skills were improving fast but not with girls; I didn’t have a girlfriend for a one and a half year. Although I was dating a lot via dating sites, I was getting no results, except for a few fuglies and one attractive girl who lived in another city and broke my heart after a few weeks. I highly pedistalized her.
One day I went out with an extremely hot girl who had travelled a lot in South East Asia. We went for a drink but I couldn’t keep a fun conversation going with her and things died out fast. I realized this was my major weak point. I was a typical boring beta male with bad traits like neediness and nice behavior. Nice guys don't get laid. Ever notice how all the hot girls keep complaining about guys they got laid with who turned out to be an asshole? You could be that guy!
It was the week before New Year’s Eve 2008/2009 when I found out that most of my few friends were staying at home with their girlfriends and children. I was looking at two options: sit at home alone like some pathetic loser or man up and do something about it.
Two days before New Year’s I jumped in my car at seven in the morning with only a small backpack and some food. It was minus twelve degrees Celsius outside and my wiper fluid was frozen because I was too cheap to buy some decent anti-freeze fluid. Half the ride I couldn’t see a damn thing and was driving on the German autobahn, the only highway in the world where you can drive as fast as you want. I drove for eight hours straight to Prague in the Czech Republic. I parked my car in a sketchy underground garage and after a while found a hostel.
Those were the best three days of my life to date. I met lots of people of all nationalities and e
njoyed hanging out with them, especially thanks to Jonathan, the Peruvian-Norwegian guy who got me involved in most of the activities. He’s still a friend and visits me from time to time.
On New Year’s Eve I was dancing, kissing and touching a big-boobed Singaporean girl all night. I didn’t get the Singapore flag, but I still had one hell of a time in Prague. I mean, I’d never stayed in a hostel before and suddenly there were hot nineteen-year-olds walking around in their underwear in front of me. Lots of people were asking if I had Facebook, which wasn’t very popular in Holland at the time. I quickly set up an account and got fifteen friends instantly.
From this moment on I was certain what was really missing in my life: Fun and Adventure. I couldn’t believe how it was pretty much normal for every European or Australian college student to go abroad and have lots of fun. How much had I missed out all of those years?
When the company I worked for finally went bankrupt, 125 people lost their job and I was the only one kind of happy about it. This was my chance and my excuse. I figured that if I could backpack alone for three days and have fun, I could also do it for three years. Apparently a decent three days in Prague didn’t keep me from being clueless; it never occurred to me that Prague would be a walk in the park compared to what I was about to experience.
My last few months at home, I was anxious to leave it all behind and saw only the negatives of staying any longer in this adventureless life. My friends were not going out much anymore because they already had girlfriends and children. And if I went out with one of them, we basically stood around and watched other people have fun, downing a few beers and/or being too stoned to even talk to girls. We had fun but together as buddies, not with girls. Sometimes we were so zombified by the insanely strong Dutch weed that if we started speaking to each other, it felt like we were coming out of another dimension. Like someone just violently woke you up in the middle of the night. Needless to say, I wasn’t at all successful at getting girls.
A few weeks later I started dating a nice but pretty plump girl. I met her online, the way I met most girls back then. My “girlfriend” was fat but had some huge melons and could give hella blowjobs. I guess she was hungry all the time. Coming out of a long dry spell, I was fine with it. She was five years younger than me, had her own place and was a pretty good singer and guitar player. I like it when girls sing for me. She tried to teach me to play guitar but after a few weeks I got bored with the slow progression and gave up. I was pretty good at giving thing up back then.
Having this “girlfriend” was like hitting an all-time low and I was embarrassed to be seen with her. We never went anywhere together, just met up for sex at our houses so I guess she was more a fuckbuddy than a girlfriend anyway.
After informing my friends that I was going away for a long time, I told her that I was leaving for a while and broke up with her. She wasn’t happy with it and tried to convince me to try a long-distance relationship. I was thinking of all the hot girls I was going to meet and said no to that.
So at this point, I was out of a job and single again. By day I was planning my trip and getting rid of everything connected to me. I started sending letters to every company or website that had my address. Basically I made myself disappear off the radar. In the evenings I played darts with my buddies, smoked a lot of weed and had some beers and chips while listening to the greatest reggae singer still alive: Alpha Blondy. Those days were great, getting stoned and having fun with my friends every day of the week. Yes, at 31 years old I still wasn’t very mature.
For those wondering how I was planning to afford to travel around the world without working; as said I owned an apartment in the city center of my home town. I had bought it in 1999 at the age of twenty-two, just when the real estate boom started in Holland. It took me nine months to totally renovate the whole place, something I did 95% on my own since my “good” friends were somehow never around to help. I sold it in 2006 with a 40K Euro profit, months before the market started to collapse. Those who did their homework in those years saw the collapse coming and got out when I did. I’d been sitting on that money ever since and from then on had just rented a decent house and bought a nice car. I set my moving-out date at just two days before I left on my trip, so I had plenty of time to sell a lot of stuff and box up the rest.
There was a lot of stuff. You may remember me mentioning that I spent a lot of time at home watching movies. I had a specialized home cinema room in my house which took me months to build. It had a hundred-inch projector screen, a top quality projector, Cinema love seats, a 7.1 sound system with big JBL speakers, special cinema lighting and carpet and about three thousand DVDs. It was my first dream come true, and I couldn’t bear to sell it, so I boxed everything up and stored it at my sister’s house. The DVDs alone filled twenty-one boxes.
I went to city hall and registered myself as a homeless person and told them I was leaving for at least a year. This is the only way in Holland to get out of the expensive health insurance. So the only thing I had left in Holland was a bank account. During my last week I sold my beloved car, sorted out a few last things and said goodbye to my family and friends. It was time to see what I had in me and prove myself to the world.
It was time to break up with old habits and improve myself in every way possible.
Chapter One – Going East
All my life I’ve been fascinated by Russia and its cold, dark past. I grew up in the eighties and was always intrigued by the cold war and the military stand-off between NATO and the Warsaw Pact. My father once visited St Petersburg for his work in 1984, when it was still called Leningrad. It was a short visit but the stories he brought back fascinated me – the monotone and grey lifestyle of the people, the whole communist system and its many flaws. Coming from the West it just seemed like another world.
I have also always been interested in military history and since Russia did the most fighting (and suffering) in World War II I had a great interest in seeing this country. After visiting several war museums and famous places throughout Germany, Poland and the Baltic states, I’d made it to Mother Russia. This is where my trip would really start. I had raced through the first six countries, doing nothing more than high-speed sightseeing and some lame flirting with local or backpacker girls. Still, I was already proud of myself for the two cold approaches I’d done on local girls in clubs.
These were things I barely ever did at home. The first one I tried was in Warsaw, in Poland. I had been looking for a bar to go to for the whole evening and finally found one. I sat down at the bar next to a couple of very hot-looking girls. Girls I would never dare to speak to back home. They told me they were Ukrainian students and I talked with them for a little while. I even quoted a funny Russian line to them. I had met a Russian guy in Berlin who taught me the phrase “Idite na guy”, which is basically the Russian way of saying “Fuck you”. What it literally means is “Go to the dick”. The girls laughed hard but warned me never to say it out loud, because Polish or Russian guys would beat the crap out of me if I did. The conversation died out quickly and our glasses were empty. After excusing myself I never returned. What the hell could I talk about with these girls? I was never a student so my knowledge of university life is zero, and at that time I had no pick-up skills whatsoever. Avoiding an expensive round of cocktails was the best thing I could do.
Still, even if it wasn’t a success, it was a start. You can’t boost your self-confidence all at one go. The second time I did a cold approach was on a local girl in Vilnius, the capital of Lithuania. I went to a club named Tarentino’s with a big group from the hostel. It was an awesome place to go. I approached two girls but the hottest one, named Edita, barely understood English. I took her by the hand to a quiet spot to avoid the loud music. She spoke some words of German but my German was terrible and so was my beta style of picking up. If I had a time machine and went back there now, I could do way better on both those approaches, but looking back on it, it was still a giant leap from online dates
with average-looking Dutch girls. At least travelling made me feel like somebody and not so socially awkward in clubs and bars. It was a bad start but at least it was a start. I was trying.
Russia – St Petersburg
The bus finally drove into St Petersburg after a ten-hour ride from Tallinn in Estonia. Russian Customs were surprisingly easy – they didn’t even check my bag or give me any trouble. So much for the strict Russian borders, I thought. After being dropped off somewhere, I had to find my way to the hostel, which isn’t easy in a country that uses a completely different alphabet. Most places in Europe, you can work out the sounds, like ‘hôtel’ in France, but how on earth is the innocent tourist supposed to know that he’s looking for the ‘общежитие’? Still, though it took me a while (and the metro was super-crowded), I finally found the hostel. It was a simple one, with the crappiest beds I’d seen in three weeks on my trip. The bed had no bedsprings; it was just a wooden board with a two-centimeter mattress on it. You might as well sleep on the floor. Welcome to Russia.
During the day, I met an Australian and two Finnish guys. That night, after drinking a bunch of vodka shots, we went out to a club called Achtung. It was a fun night. I noticed a hot girl with model-quality looks glancing at me a few times from the dance floor, and after a few vodka shots of courage I went over to talk to her. Her name was Sofia, and she came from Uzbekistan. She was studying and modeling in St Petersburg. We danced for a while and I got a quick kiss out of her. She was at least an 8.5 on the hotness scale, but after a while she lost interest. In other words, I didn’t have the skill set to keep things going. Also, I think she was looking for a rich dude rather than a backpacker.
The guys and I tried another bar before going back to the hostel. They were going on about what a good job I did talking to that hot girl – and that is just what beta guys do. Congratulate each other on nothing. I was actually proud for having the balls to walk up to a strange hot girl and saying “Hi, how are you doing?” Saying that is nothing. It’s just a simple opening line, one anyone can use on anyone. All it does is what it’s designed to: open a conversation. It’s nothing to be proud of. What’s worth being proud of is managing to keep the conversation up.
Around the World in 80 Girls: The Epic 3 Year Trip of a Backpacking Casanova Page 2