I read
Bang: Colombia a few months ago and it had a big impact on my travel game and my decision to come live in Medellin for a few months. Big thanks to Roosh for publishing this book and releasing it free to his readers. It was really helpful in hitting the ground running in Colombia. Just thought I'd contribute back some constructive feedback I had after reading the book and applying it in Colombia.
Context
-I'm 25.
-I am highly conversational in Spanish, but not fluent. For example, when I go on dates with girls, I can tell stories with ease, but if I saw a movie in Spanish without subtitles, I wouldn't understand a lot of it.
-I can't dance for shit and I avoided meeting girls through dancing or going on dates that involved dancing, but if I ended up someplace with dancing, I'd dance with a girl if she wanted to.
-I spent 3 months in Colombia (mostly living in Oviedo in Medellin) after having spent 5 months in other countries in South America.
-I went out for cold approaches several times with another guy I met through the forums who arrived a month after I did and compared notes with him and we generally observed the same things.
Feedback
(this feedback is based on the free copy Roosh distributed pre-paperback. I'm not sure if it's been revised since then because it did have some pre-release-ish stuff in it, like the URLs weren't real URLs but instead like
http://1.bangcolombia.com)
There were several Spanish translation errors. On a practical level, it probably won't affect someone's results to make the same minor errors in speaking, but this is something that's really simple to check and makes a big difference in perceived value for some readers.
Quote:Quote:
consider that in Colombia there’s no word for “dating” or “seeing” someone—you’re either a friend or a boyfriend.
This is not accurate. "saliendo con" means "going out with" in the same way it does in the US. They also have a lot of words for friends with benefits: "amigovios", "amigos especiales", "amigos con derechos."
One really good tip from your blog that you omitted in the book is the
one you mentioned about carrying a pen and paper everywhere and writing words you wanted to use and couldn't. I did this (and also wrote down words I saw/heard and didn't understand) and it was really useful.
The packing section was fine but I found the
packing list on your blog much more useful.
I found a lot of the cultural notes really accurate and useful, particularly the parts about how quickly Colombianas get attached, how affectionate they are, and how jealous they are. If I told a girl I went out to some bars with my friend, she'd often accusingly ask me, "Did you meet girls?" I'd say, "Yes, hundreds!" in an ambiguously sarcastic way and that seemed to work well.
The big thing I think you missed in culture is how signicant the flakiness issue is. You say it's an issue with college girls, but I've found it's an issue with almost every girl. My first month in Colombia, I was getting stood up 2-3 times a week (as in the girl agrees to the date the day before, just doesn't appear at the meetup place). I found out the reason is that girls expect you to confirm the day of, so if you don't (even if nobody says anything about confirming), they'll assume that if you didn't confirm, they're not obligated to show up. After I figured this out, I always told the girl I'd call her that day to confirm and I never got stood up again.
Despite avoiding stand-ups, dates did fall through
a lot. I'd generally set up dates with girls for the following day and get a firm time and place agreed upon, but 70% of the time, the next day the girls would either cancel or not answer when I called to confirm. I think the reason is that it's pretty difficult to establish rapport with them on the approach, especially if it's during night game. I generally couldn't separate the girl from her friends plus it's hard to talk to her because we're always in some loud club, which makes it very hard to understand a foreign language. Girls over 25 were more reliable and girls over 30 were generally solid.
Some of the daygame strategies seemed fairly inefficient. You suggest going to the Oviedo McDonald's and warn that there could be "many days here with no approach opportunities." My daygame strategy was just to walk Milla de Oro (Carrera 43 btw Lleras and CC Santa Fe) and stop girls and either ask directions then transition into conversation or just go direct and say they're cute and I wanted to meet them. I did study in the Juan Valdez in Oviedo, but there were very rarely sets there. Once I was sitting on the bench and an HB8 sat next to me and I followed the "spanish question" script almost exactly and got a lay from it.
One golden tip from the nightgame section was about how easy it is to open guys and get them to accept you into the group. I always just said, "Esos jeans son cheveres. Donde los compraste?" and the guy would almost always be really friendly and ask me where I'm from and start introducing me to his friends.
One tip I got from
MiXX for ColombianCupid was to get girls on webcam. I thought this was really helpful as it solidifies the interaction and makes it so that she doesn't feel like she's just interacting with some text. I think you're a little hard on MSN messenger overall and you underplay how hard it is to talk on the phone. As I said, I speak Spanish well, but I always found it
extremely difficult to understand girls on the phone since the sound is much worse and a lot of times the girl is out somewhere noisy or otherwise is in a house with she shares with 8 family members who are all chattering in the background. MSN Messenger was generally much smoother and if you quickly get down to pushing for a meetup and get out, you don't get trapped in a boring, drawn out conversation.
The section about the post-lay cab fare shakedown was creepily accurate.
I tried to go to Escobar Rosas when I was in Bogota and it seemed like an abandoned building with no signs of a club, but I can't say for sure since I only went one night (Thursday or Friday, don't recall).
The "where to live in Medellin" section is organized in a very confusing way because you give overviews of the neighborhoods, usually based on what bars are in the area. Then you say "After figuring out where to lodge, it's time to meet girls!" and you start discussing bars again. The result is that information on places to go out is arbitrarily split into two different sections. There were a few times when I remembered you mentioning a bar in one neighborhood, then referring back to the section where you discuss nightlife in that neighborhood and being unable to find it because it was actually in the lodging section.
You misspell the name of the bar La Octava as "La Octavia" several times. I went there a few times and found it pretty unremarkable. It seemed like your standard Lleras sit-down bar with maybe a higher proportion of guys.