Around the World in 80 Girls: The Epic 3 Year Trip of a Backpacking Casanova (3 page)

Meanwhile
, back home, my family received a new bank card for me and sent it by FedEx to the hostel in Moscow. An ATM in Estonia had eaten my ING bank card and since then I’d been paying in cash only. The card arrived the day after my family sent it, but customs kept the card for a whole five days. Great fun, what with my funds running out.

The
Chilean guys had to move on, and I promised I’d visit them once and if I reached Chile. Meanwhile I stayed in the hostel and practiced my Russian with Julia. During the day most backpackers went sightseeing, so I was alone with her most of the time, which gave me enough time to game her. She taught me the Cyrillic alphabet by letting me read the newspaper out loud. We were sitting closer and closer together and started touching and flirting a bit.

Later
that day we went out together with a group from the hostel and visited a small club called Papa’s Place. That Monday was Happy Hour night, and at one point we were getting four drinks for the price of one. No need to say we all ended up shitfaced. I walked back to the hostel with Julia but stopped at a small park close to it. We started kissing and things got pretty steamy pretty quick. When I put my hand under her short dress I felt she was really wet and ready to go. She wanted me then and there but it was already daylight, so I asked where she lived. We took a one-hour ride on the metro to the suburbs. To me it looked like a Russian ghetto, with countless grey concrete buildings straight out of Soviet times. I made a fool of myself by asking her about it and she looked surprised and said that the really bad neighborhoods were further outside the city. Coming from a western country, I had never seen a neighborhood like this and had no interest in seeing the “really” bad neighborhoods.

I
had to pay a bribe to the guard to let me inside the building. Her apartment was small and old, but she had a bed and that was the most important thing. We both took a quick cold shower and jumped in bed to warm each other. She was the first lay on my trip. One down, many more to follow. Julia was smart, twenty-three years old, a working student and nice girl who had a beautiful slim body and a butter face. This means nice body, BUT HER FACE. Still, for four days we shagged like there was no tomorrow, but then my bank card finally arrived.  I only had a 25-day visa, so after one last romantic get-together I had to move on to the next destination.

W
hen I told them I was banging a twenty–three year old Russian girl, my friends back home went crazy. Especially since I was already in my early thirties.

Russia – Kazan

Kazan is a medium-sized city, which in Russia means it only has well over a million people. I arrived late at night and luckily the owner of the hostel was waiting for me. She was a young woman, about twenty-seven years old, and she lived in an apartment on the outskirts of the city. The hostel itself was basically just an apartment with one room that served as a dorm. I was the only one there. The next day was a Friday and I went to the city center by bus. The buses were dirt cheap, only thirty rubles a ride. Every bus has a girl collecting the money and I pissed mine off because I only had a thousand-ruble note with me.  It didn’t help that I couldn’t speak back to her and just kept shrugging my shoulders as she tried to find 970 rubles change.  That’s one girl I did
not
manage to add to my shagging diary.

That
day and the next day I walked all over the city centre and was taking pictures of everything.  The Kazan Kremlin is very beautiful, and since it was the weekend there were a lot of weddings going on, with all the bridesmaid-eye candy that implies. Kazan is one of Russia’s Islamic provinces, with a lot of Turkish-descended people around. That can mean only one thing: Döner kebab places. There’s nothing better than burying your face into a giant kebab after a long day of walking around. There was also a big McDonald’s, so I knew I wouldn’t starve.

In
the main shopping street I sat down next to some cute girls who didn’t pay attention to me until I pulled out my street map and it became obvious I was a tourist. Their attitude changed immediately and they started talking to me. Of course they didn’t speak English and I tried to talk some extremely bad Russian but that didn’t help either. I bailed out the moment it became awkward to try to talk to them any longer, and later I went to the train station and bought a ticket to Yekaterinburg for the next day.

Back
in the hostel some boring backpackers had arrived but they didn’t want to go out at night. I had a look in the Russian Lonely planet and read there was a small salsa bar named Cuba Libre not too far away. I thought,
What the hell,
and went there. It was a small place indeed, with just one bar and a small dance floor. I talked to a platinum blonde girl with big boobs at the bar who looked interested at first. She spoke a little bit of English, but she lost interest after she found out I was not going to stay long. So I walked up to two girls on the dance floor and started dancing with them. The cuter of the two was a skinny girl from Moscow. She was nice and spoke reasonable English, but she also had absolutely no interest in flirting.

At
the table next to us there were three girls who were drinking and dancing a lot. One of them had massive knockers that were almost falling out of her dress. One of the others was skinny and had a cute sexy face; the third girl was skinny but not that good-looking. I danced a bit with them, but that was it: I couldn’t get the conversation going and the one with the big knockers danced with some other guy. At least I tried, I thought to myself, and decided to go back to the hostel.  Things weren’t going anywhere, and I didn’t expect anything to happen. I was wrong.

I
was waiting for the toilet to be free when the three girls pulled me out of the line and outside the bar to smoke a cigarette. We all lit one up and one of the first things they asked me was: “Do you want to go home with us?” Now, I don’t get asked home by three young hot Russian girls often but I was surprisingly relaxed about it. I thought that I was either getting mugged or in for great night. If you want to have fun you have to take risks, and since the whole point of the trip was to have fun, I jumped in a taxicab with them and we drove off. We went to the apartment of the big-boobed and very drunk blonde girl. She lives there with her father but he wasn’t in. They cooked me a midnight meal (try to find a girl in the west who will do that) and we had some more beers. After an hour the two skinny girls went to bed and I was alone with the girl with the big rack. Her name was Julia, just like the girl back in Moscow. She was twenty-two and worked as an English teacher. We talked all night and I tried to make a move on her but she wasn’t that easy. I left at nine in the morning; it took me two hours and a lot of buses to find my way back to the hostel.

After
sleeping for a few hours, I went to meet her in a park. We walked around a bit, and sat down at a bench. We kissed and later we talked about the fact I was leaving that same evening. I asked her if she wanted me to stay. Julia told me that she actually had a boyfriend and wasn’t sure about the whole thing. But then she said that she wouldn’t be seeing her boyfriend until next weekend, and I jumped on that, pointing out that we could have the whole week together. Since it wasn’t vacation-time (except for me), she had to work during the week, and I told her that if she wanted to see me, she’d have to make some time for me in the evenings. She agreed but said, “But how, you already have a train ticket”. I took the ticket I had paid twenty-five dollars for out of my jacket and I ripped it up in front of her. She looked me in the eyes to see if I was serious, and then we kissed again.

Julia
asked me to meet her at work the next day. She taught English at a building in the city center. When I got there, she asked me if I would make an appearance in the class to talk with the students a bit. She didn’t tell me that it was a surprise visit for the students, so I was a bit shocked when I walked in and she said something like “Tadaaa, a real foreigner who is travelling around the world!” I had no idea what kind of students she had – I didn’t even know if I should be expecting kindergarteners or geriatrics – but I saw they were all in their twenties. Out of fifteen persons, there was only one guy and about seven or eight good looking girls. At first they were shy about speaking English in front of a foreigner, but they loosened up after a while. Julia introduced me as just a friend and I noticed the girls in the class were quite interested in me. One girl named Svetlana, who was a ballet dancer and stunningly hot – a 9 on the scale of 10 – asked all kinds of questions about travelling. I told her to come with me and flirted a bit with her. Julia kicked me under the table.

I
started to tease her more and more and it drove her nuts. Clearly, though, it worked, because she couldn’t stop kissing after the class ended, and started asking me sexual questions.

She
invited me to stay with her in a dacha, the Russian version of a summerhouse. That Wednesday I met up with her and some of her friends, two guys and two girls who were both named Irina. The wooden dacha was near the river Volga and looked quite nice; one of the guys owned it and had built it himself. To make a long story short, we had a barbeque, lots of vodka – this was Russia, after all – and then went for a swim in the river. Julia took off her bra and went in the water while covering her boobs with her hands. By now she had been cock-teasing me for four days, and she was good at it, always talking about sex and asking me all kinds of sex-related questions – how many girls had I been with? Did I masturbate? Did I like to eat pussy? Did I do anal?  How big was I? 

I told her she’d find out soon enough.

When we went back to the summerhouse, there was some confusion as to who was going to sleep where. One of the two Irinas was pretty hot and kind of on a date with one of the guys, but she didn’t actually want to sleep alone in a room with him. The Irinas wanted to share the only bedroom with Julia, but I managed to talk her into spending the night in that bedroom with me.

We
went to bed and of course I was assuming we’re going to have sex: she’d been talking my ears off about it all week. But once we were in bed she became very shy and didn’t want to do much other than talk about it. After almost two hours of talking and trying I was getting really fed up and make an angry comment to her, telling her to leave me alone because I wanted to sleep. I was still quite drunk off the vodka and irritated by her holding off.

She
left the room and came back a few minutes later. Her attitude had switched 180 degrees and she jumped on me and started making out. Within a few minutes we were having sex, which was actually only kind of average: she was a bit thick and her big boobs were very saggy once they came out of her bra. Half an hour later we did it again, this time breaking the condom in the process. I only realized that out after I was done, but I’d already been wondering why it had suddenly started to feel so good. Her face was red as a tomato the next day when we bought a morning-after pill at a pharmacy. I tried to have sex with her at her school that day when all the students and her girlfriend Irina had left, but though things got steamy she wouldn’t do it.

On
my last day I spent some time with her at her apartment. We had to take a cold shower because the heater was broken. My willy nearly disappeared when she washed it with ice-cold water and it was my turn to have a tomato-colored face when she made a comment about it. She’d turned out to be a real whiner and even complained during sex. Now, before then I’d never had any complaints about my performance and that much whining and bitching made me angry. She was the one who was very inexperienced and this whining of hers made me insecure (and soft). The sex was terrible. An hour later we had anal sex and afterwards she told me she was finally completely satisfied. Despite all this, the beta me still liked her.

It
was weird that she complained that much, because she seemed to really be into me and held back her tears a bit when she said goodbye in the train. Or maybe she faked that a bit. Either way, it doesn’t matter.  She’s married with an American, had his (?) baby and lives somewhere in the States now.

Russia – Yekaterinburg

Because I was really late buying my new ticket to Yekaterinburg, I could only get a ticket for a four-person compartment instead of a cheap ticket for a fifty-five bed wagon. There were three Russian guys in the compartment and they worked out I was a tourist as soon as they saw my backpack. They didn’t speak much English, almost none in fact, but with my pocket language book I could make myself understandable. One guy was a football referee, another one was an engineer and the last one was a young soldier who already had three kids. After a while the soldier pulled out a one-liter bottle and put it on the table. It was some black liquid that he assured me was an herbal elixir that would make me very strong. Well, the only thing strong was the alcohol percentage: fifty percent, and we drank straight from the bottle. We drank half the night and by the time the bottle was empty I didn’t need the translation book anymore: I spoke fluent Russian and they spoke fluent English, or at least that’s how it seemed. We were all speaking the herbal elixir language. The next morning the train rolled into the station and I said goodbye to my drinking buddies. I had a massive headache and was sick all weekend.

The
only things I remember are eating in a restaurant with the guy who worked at the hostel (there were no other visitors), getting a 5000 Ruble note from the ATM and not being able to use it anywhere and visiting the place where the whole Romanov imperial family was brutally murdered during the 1918 Communist revolution and canceling a date with a girl I had met in St Petersburg.