A Taste of What's to Come

I love to dance – you should all know this by now – so when my roommate suggested we go dancing, I wholeheartedly agreed. I have been spending a lot of money lately and so my goal was to go out with minimal expenses – and I am happy to say I was quite successful. We got on the Kiss 106.1 guest list so we didn’t have to pay the $10 cover and since I was the DD, I only bought one drink at the very beginning of the night, which is perfect because unlike some of my friends, I do not need any alcohol in my system to get myself dancing. Among the many adventures that were had last night there is one particular story that got me thinking and inspired this posting.

About halfway through the night I ended up dancing with one of the few guys at the club who was taller than me. He turned out to be an Italian, named Giovanni, who spoke little English but had been in the US for about nine months – or so he told me. Being that we were at a club, he was speaking in broken English, and slurring his words due to his intoxication it was very difficult to understand everything he was telling me. What I did pick up on was that he thought I was beautiful and wanted my friends and I to come home with him and his friends – or if we weren’t so keen on that idea they’d be willing to come to our house for the night.

At this point I decided it was time to stop dancing with Giovanni and move on to someone else. He was obviously getting the wrong idea and there was no way my friends and I were going anywhere with the Italians. I told him that I needed to go with my friends to get a drink from the bar (known as H20) and maneuvered myself away from him and into the other room where I re-grouped with my friends. Unfortunately this was not my last encounter with Giovanni for the evening – apparently Italians are persistent little buggers.

Throughout the rest of the evening my friends and I were “found” by the three Italians despite our best attempts to avoid them – it probably didn’t help that because of my height I was pretty easy to find in the crowd. I continued to convey to Giovanni that we were not going home with him and he was not coming home with us. The best response that he came up with to this argument was, “I love you,” to which I literally laughed in his face. Yes, perhaps it was a bit harsh of me – but I honestly couldn’t believe that he thought the line would work. It’s something out of a movie – not real life – and I am SO not the kind of girl that lines work on. Period.

After about 45 minutes of my persistent rejection of Giovanni’s unrelenting questions of what I wanted – no, I did not want to go get food or a drink and no, did I want to spend the night with him (even though he repeatedly assured me he wouldn’t try anything) – I finally convinced him that all I wanted to do was dance. He gave me a hug, told me I was beautiful, planted one last kiss on my cheek, and was gone. Phew.

This morning as I was falling asleep at 3am I reflected on my experience with the Italian. During one of the phases of my rejecting him he looked at me and asked me if did not like Italy. My response had been that I love Italy – but that didn’t mean we were going to hook up. I began to think about next fall and what kind of experiences I will have with the European men that I encounter. Are they all going to be this persistent and giving me unwanted attention? Are they going to tell me that they love me after 15 minutes of dancing?

I think that my experience last night was a little taste of what next fall is going to hold for me. I’m not planning to spend every night out at the clubs or anything, but from what I’ve read and heard stories about, I’m likely to be hit on more frequently than I am in America. While in some ways it’ll probably be a confidence boost, I think it’ll also become meaningless after awhile, and extremely repetitive and annoying. I can see myself becoming irritated and snapping at people who aren’t really doing anything wrong (unless they will not leave me alone after a significant period of time). I know that I will need to be guarded while I am abroad, but I also want to experience the culture and get to know real people in the places I am visiting.

I guess overall I feel like there is nothing wrong with dancing with someone and a little bit of flirtation – but when it’s done it needs to be done. I don’t want to have to be struggling to get away from some creeper in a foreign country when I’ve said over and over that I’m not interested in his advances. I don’t know if that’s an American thing to expect no to mean no or a female thing. At least now I know that if there the foreign man is relentless in his pursuit I will be able to stand my ground. I will not be swayed or convinced otherwise. I have good intuition and am responsible enough to know when to say yes and when to say now and last night proved it to me again.

But it’s still a funny story none-the-less.

I’ll leave you with a picture from the Trinity website that was posted today – proof that I was at the club last night. I’m in the background in the left hand upper corner …