Let’s Make Like Croatia’s Second Largest City, and Split!

So we caught the flight from Amsterdam to Split, via Zagreb. As soon as we arrived in Croatia we were hit by the stink of smoke. The smoking ban hasn’t reached Croatia yet, and everyone smokes indoors.

However as soon as we arrived in Split, there was no reason to stay in. The climate was amazing – hot but not too hot, Mediterranean, a slight breeze and no clouds. The sea was a rich blue and the sun reflected off it constantly. And the town itself was crazy. It’s built within the remains of Diocletian’s Palace, out of a smooth creamy-white stone. The city is a maze of pathways, darting around buildings and other additions to what was once a palace 1700 years ago. It’s truly beautiful.

But what about the chicks, right? Well it’s true, the women in southern Croatia are amazing. They have that Slavic tall, skinny thing with extra long legs that reach all the way to the ground, and the dark brown Mediterranean skin. They also have the pale grey-blue eyes of the Slavs, and the combination together is absolutely stunning. But how do you meet them?

Well like in Amsterdam the bars are all set tables with little or no mixing. But here there’re no clubs. Well there are one or two theoretically, but everyone was still seated within them, and strangely most of the people in them seemed to be under 18. Long as it’s legal, right? ;o) Over the first two nights we opened maybe five sets in total, and I don’t think any of them went much further than the opener as the language barrier chipped away at the communication.

We couldn’t exactly use dancefloor game as there was no dancing. But we chilled out and enjoyed the city – I think there might be worse places to spend time opening sets that don’t go anywhere.

Then we went to Hvar. Again it was beautiful in much the same way as Split but much smaller and a larger proportion of tourists, notably Aussies, to locals. Also it was much more of a party town than Split. There were bars all along the seafront and later we found a club in and old castle in the hills. But I kicked off in the daytime with a warm up set with some Australians. I just asked them places to go and they mentioned a couple. Fargo and I were joking about asking all the Aussies we met how they fared in the Olympics medal table, as we weren’t sure whether they finished fourth or fifth. We were sure they’d beat us as well, as they take their sport so seriously. They wouldn’t want to be beaten by the Poms now, would they?

But we chickened out of that one! The set opened and we had a quick chat, and they later reopened us as we were walking back from having drunk the best Mohitos of the holiday. Nice minute piece of social proof.

So anyway we ended up at this club in a castle and it was pretty dead. There was one large group of rowdy Aussies who were dancing like idiots on the dancefloor. There were handfuls of chic looking Europeans lounging around the sides of the club. But it was mainly empty.

Fargo opened a group of three Russians sitting down a step from us with his now-successfully-field-tested “Is it alright to dump a girl by text?” opener, which usually gets a good hook. It was a bit strange as we were sitting behind them, but we hung in there.

Eventually we moved to more general conversation and I ended up talking to a blonde Russian. Incidentally these Russians were actually living in Germany. But I do have to reassess my opinion of them all being rude and dodgy, bad stereotyping on my part!

So I was using my standard natural curiosity game on her and was chatting to her for a while about Hamburg, where she was from – one of the furthest east Russian states, one of the ones on the Risk board that you never heard of before playing the game – and about her personality. I think it’s clear to me know that I can get quite regularly into comfort game with girls. So I need to move on from there to more humour, attraction, escalation and seduction communication. So I was chatting to this girl and Fargo was telling me that I should escalate and should kiss close. I think this girl would have been a strong number close, but of course I wasn’t going to see her again.

So I tried to escalate. I tried moving the conversation out of comfort into more attraction based game to get her to open up a bit. See this girl was a bit closed. Not just in a Russian way, in fact she was open to conversation. But in a “I can’t let go and have fun” kind of way. She actually said that line to me. So to have sex with this girl would be hard, and a kiss close for me would be difficult too. I tried a bit more to get her to open up but I just wasn’t getting the vibe from her. Eventually I bailed, but I must have talked to her for about 40 minutes.

Fargo was feeling off that day so we called it a night. The next day was back in Split but once again it was hard to open sets in seated bars and the clubs were once again not up to much. We took an early flight to Zagreb the next day.

Zagreb at first sight is a pretty boring typically Central European style city, like the unexciting bits of Budapest all in one place. But there are little bits and pieces of cool within it. We found a free guide and we checked out a few bars and streets. One street was full of seated bars again, but a nice place to chill out.

We also went to one bar / nightclub that was in the guide, and though it looked quite cool it was mainly rock music with a bunch of guys and not many girls, and groups of friends all to themselves. The dancefloor was guys headbanging. But to start with we opened up the nearest two girls.

We decided on the “Do you guys speak English?” opener out of praticality, and Fargo went for it. It turned out that one of the girls Au Paired in England for a year and spoke pretty good English, and the other one spoke some English but was a lot quieter.

So once again I ended up doing natural curiosity game on the talkative chick, chatting about Leamington Spa, the Croatian language, football, some other stuff I can’t remember. This time it was a lot higher energy, which was helped by the fact that she was high energy herself. I was also able to be a bit more humorous, it can be harder with foreigners but it seemed to be working here.

So there was more attraction there, but she wasn’t that hot, maybe a generous 6. When I went to the loo Fargo told me that the talkative girl was asking if I was single, so it looked like the attraction worked. We had to go back to the hotel as Fargo’s phone was spazzing out and had thrown him a bit (not least because it has all our photos on it!) and we went back to the bar but it was impossible to open large groups of mainly male Croatians.

So if you’re going to Croatia, then head for Hvar. And Amsterdam is great if you can find some friendly girls. You can meet people in hostels too though we didn’t this time. But the weather and scenery isn’t as nice as Croatia.

What went well

• Fargo was kind enough to give me the option of opening sets. He kept saying “My set or yours?” Of course the easy option for me was to leave it to Fargo to open the sets and I could then watch. But I would force myself to say “Yes” against my initial reaction, and then follow through. This is again an example of me relying on other people to push me into sets, but with the added factor of requiring some proactive choice and effort on my part. This helped me immensely.

What could have gone better

• We were faced with very difficult (for us) opening circumstances in a lot of places. At least we did open up in Split despite the results. But we could have opened more in difficult circumstances, Like the large group of Aussies, or other people in the seated bars.

What did I do well that I haven’t done before

• Semi-forcing myself to open. And I would say a lot smoother and more socially calibrated comfort game.