Last year when I was traveling Argentina I met all kinds of hostel types. They were usually pretty homogenous, following the same lonely planet trail, with the same stories, and the same questions such as “How long have you been traveling?” and “Where have you been thus far?” They quickly wore me out. However, I was always intrigued to meet the individuals who planned on going to Brazil for Carnaval. It was usually the same story “Oy mate, I’m going to Rio for Carnaval, should be amayzin’.” While they partied in Brazil that year, I was drinking fernets in Cordoba. I kissed a couple girls in Argentina including what I thought was a sure-lay with bad logistics and no knowledge of love motels in Buenos Aires. I’m not complaining though, I loved Argentina.
Fast forward to a year later. My friend D from SF convinces me over Vietnamese food in NYC to head to Brazil instead of yet another trip to comfortable, familiar Costa Rica. We begin traveling together, and decide to spend Carnaval in Diamantina. We find a “republica”, or basically a co-ed frat house, on a Google search, wire the money from a bank in Belo Horizonte, and consider ourselves set for a week of orgies.
Once in Diamantina, we find that the Republica doesn’t appear to exist. No one on the street, Rua do Rosario, has ever heard of the Republica, named “Quase Amor” or “Nearly Love”. Great. We’ve been scammed. The locals shake their heads at us, and tell us wire fraud is common in Brazil. Luckily a friendly kid in the pirate taxi we took from BH lets us shack up with him at his republica. Tulio was his name, and he hooked us up bigtime with parties, beer, and food. I doubt he ever finds this blog, but BIG props to Tulio, you and your roommates were chill as shit and just more examples of how friendly Brazilians can be.
D and I return to Rua do Rosario the next day and still can’t find the republica after doing some detective work on the republica website. We find street numbers in photos, yet those numbers don’t exist anywhere near the street. We continue to ask everyone near the supposed location including a homely old woman sitting on steps. Somehow this leads to a Dr. Evil looking guy in a jumpsuit with clear green eyes who walks out and greets me by my name. Holy shit, the place exists. He tells us 80 (!) people will be staying in the house with us. D and I eagerly await the unfathomable amount of puss to greet us.
The girls at the hostel were pretty beastly. The cute ones didn’t seem to dig on me and D for some reason. We were Gringo-Kings. Everywhere we’d go we would get called out “Gringo!” “Where you are from!?”, etc. We would chat up girls in English because we knew that’s where the advantage was. It worked. A lot. I wondered if we were having more success than the beefed up juiceheads with fat silver chains on. I’m sure we did better than many of them.
But what do I mean by doing better? You see, the biggest issue of these ‘republicas’ and Carnaval, is that strangers aren’t allowed inside. One afternoon I met this girl who we’ll call ‘YogaTaters’. I can’t remember how exactly I met her, but after meeting her, her friends came to me and told me to go talk to her more, and that she liked me. (This behavior is very common. I have never been cheered on and egged on so much to makeout with random people’s girl-friends in my life.) So anyway, I talk to her for 30 seconds and we make out. Pretty standard for Carnaval. Later on we happen to meet again and we hook up outside of the Diamantina Church near a big tree. It gets pretty hot. She says she won’t have sex with me, but I eventually get her to agree to go to my republica, I try to sneak her in, and the tired black security guard won’t let her. FML.
So no sex or anything much more than you’d do in 8th grade, but lots and lots of kisses, with some truly beautiful Brazilian girls. I will never get tired of making out with a hot foreign girl and barely understanding her mother tongue. It makes me feel like James Bond. D and I absolutely killed the game, talking to tons of girls with lines like “Hey do you speak English”, “Hey you’re pretty”, “Hey players”, “I love you”, “This is real love right here”, “Fala ingles?”, and “Hey I’m having a theme party next week, should it be 80s or Pimps and Hos?”. Just kidding on that last one. If you’re using that line, you might be a douchebag.
Diamantina was a total and utter clusterfuck. There is no better way to describe it. After say 8 pm at night you could not enter the square or the main stage area. It was too fucking packed. I got tired of that after a couple times and would do anything I could to avoid the crowd. It was a much more “Godly” position to find a really nice perch and watch the beautiful girls as they passed, stroke their hair, and look for the next ;funky’ dance party.
After 5 nights of sleeping on a paper thin shitty mattress and drinking all hours of the day, I was ready to move on. I had 15+ passionate kisses and had a couple of wifey-hour long makeout sessions and was actually getting bored of swapping saliva. I needed some cockle attention. The party is pretty vapid when I look back on it, but would I do it again? Hell yes. Just this time with my own pimp pad.
Extra Notes:
- D had his virgin girl ready to bone after chatting really directly about how he wanted to see her naked and wanted to have sex with her. One of the roommates of Tulio’s house gave us a set of keys, but they didn’t open the main door. Cockblocked by keys. I’m pretty sure he was sobbing on the sidewalk afterward. He refutes this belief.
- The flu nearly ruined my carnival. I spent 2 days gargling salt water, drinking lots of juice, and sleeping. If I drank absolutely nothing it may have healed quicker, but I still got it in a lot. It was Carnaval, no way was I missing that action.
- Tweaker Trance was really big during the AM part of the parties. Such shitty trance. So awful. Other music that you heard every 30 minutes was Sexy Bitch by Akon/David Guetta (I still like this track), Rebolation (The carnaval theme song, annoying), “I gotta Feeling” by Black Eyed Peas (Don’t even get me started on this joke of a music group. Most undeserving music group of our generation.), Infinty (good club banger that I didn’t know about), Stereo Love (Techno/Accordian mashup, sounds really good), and “Oo-pech” (Spelled wrong, I’m sure, it’s a funky song, which means when it’s playing, hot girls are making love to the air.)
- Some of the more memorable kisses I had were:
- Hot 18 year old girl dancing funky outside my hostel, burning my eyes with her gaze. She was petite, black hair, a little too much makeup, and just a gorgeous little body and face. Some other cocksucker kissed her before me, probably because I didn’t listen to the 3-second rule. I had waited like 3 minutes. I went up to her after he had stolen a kiss. He said “This is my girlfriend”. I said “She’s my wife” and started dancing. She grinded on my leg because the music told her to. My heart was fluttering she was so pretty. We kissed some. I think I told her I was 21.
- Beautiful half-black girl with curly hair. Her name was Luana. I approached the group and began talking to her, most likely in Portuguese because she didn’t speak english. I probably told her how beautiful she was. We made out for a while. Her smile was amazing. She has since told me she loves me via e-mail. I am just your average gringo heart breaker.
- Cute drunk 19 year old girl whose name I forget. D and I were tired at like 4 AM just sitting down near our republica when this girl comes up to us and asks us where we’re from, in English. The conversation begins, she is eventually sitting next to me. I think I tell her she’s beautiful, we make out a lot. She takes drinks from her Catuaba Salvagem cheap wine bottle at every break. Total cutie. I see her a couple more times, but I’m with another girl each time.
- Bitchy cousin of D’s “Ex-Wife”, Barbara. This girl had an amazing smile and curly black hair. She looked kind of Spanish. She spoke English. I danced with 2 of her friends before talking to her which had her jealous. I reasoned that I wasn’t kissing them. Then we made out for a long time. She was a great kisser.
- This thick blonde girl in my republica who looked like she was German. She was so impressed that I was from New York. I told her we’d get a drink, and we went and made out. I asked her what her interests were. They were, in the following order, “dirty sex” and “reading”. So I dragged her back to the republica (She has a wristband on! Thank God!) and as we are approaching she is hiccuping like a drunk-sailor. Fuck me. She’s way to drunk. I have no intention of date-raping a girl who pukes on me. I ditch her to flirt with other girls outside the hostel.
- Older light black girl – D and I are sitting during one morning. I think it was the 2nd or 3rd day. D has tried to get it in a couple times unsuccessfully. This girl’s friend wants to sit down, so she sits down, and black girl sits in between her friend and me. I ask her “Como voce vai?” We talk a little in my butchered Portuguese. Might have been some English. She is taller and looks older than most of the other girls. Totally not in the set of women I’d think was interested in me. But lo and behold she tells me she likes me, so I ask if she’d like a kiss. She does. We make out.
- There were a bunch of other kisses too, including one young black girl who D and I wifed up with unfortunately. Hour long makeouts with nowhere to go fucking suck. Those girls wanted to have sex, too. We told them we were going home and then had to avoid them, that kind of sucked. I saw her the next day while making out with 29 year old. Hey, it’s Carnaval. Life without attachments.
Kissing Endnote: Going after the girls aggressively didn’t work nearly as much as them approaching us (obviously). Indirect “game” seemed to work out a lot better.
- “So na pele” was a chant that the guys in the republica taught me, which means “Just the skin”, as in, unprotected sex. I hope that’s not going on too much, but obviously it is, and I’m sure the AIDS rate is pretty damn high.
- D fell in love with a couple girls who quickly became his ‘ex wives’, because he forgot one girl’s name, and because he got caught kissing another girl when his other ‘wife’ saw him randomly in the trance-y square. Both girl’s names were Barbara! I can’t stress how important it is to remember names, which is hard for me. You’ve got to think about something else that is familiar with you that shares the girl’s name.
- There is a popular huffing drug called “lo-lo”. I think it’s computer cleaner. I got pretty fucked up on it one occassion. I thought I was going to pass out. It was pretty great.
- Every guy practices the arm-pull move. This almost never appeared to work. D became a big fan of it too. I just stroked hair instead, which also never worked.
- A couple gay guys seemed to always find D and I. One of them brushed my cock with his hand one night. That was uncomfortable.
- Lots of guys in speedos, lots of guys in drag, lots of guys and girls with very ugly tattoos.
You should right a blog called, “You might be a douchebaf if…” I tip my hat to you for passing on the drunk girl, you are a better man than I. Congrats on the reach-around, haha.