I just finished a much-needed 10-day hiatus and spent it, not so casually, at Carnaval in Brazil.

First of all… to anyone who has ever thought they’ve seen a big party, you haven’t seen shit. I’ve been to New Year’s Eve in Times Square, some of the biggest Halloween parties, 4th of July parades, etc. Nothing even came close. Mardi Gras? Please… Might as well be a Hallmark card.

Try to imagine this… 2.5 MILLION people partying and dancing in the streets. This is approximately 3-5 times the amount of people who show up for New Year’s Eve in Manhattan each year. It starts at about 3PM in the afternoon and doesn’t even begin to slow down until 5AM in the morning. Oh, and it goes for six straight days. The Brazilian equivalents of U2, Red Hot Chili Peppers, Coldplay, Lady Gaga, Beyonce, Jay-Z, The Rolling Stones and Kanye West are all doing outdoor public concerts at different points during the week. Everyone is drunk and everyone is dancing more or less non-stop.

Now, beyond this being almost humanly impossible (I’m still trying to figure out what it is about Brazilians that lets them shake their asses for so well and for so long without collapsing of exhaustion), it’s completely impractical. COMPLETELY impractical. And this is coming from a guy who regularly calls 10-day ventures to Las Vegas “business trips.”

(Technical point: I attended Carnaval in the northern city of Salvador. The difference here is that Carnaval in the southern cities is more about the parades, the costumes and the events. The ones in the north are about the parties and music. All of the tourists and gringos usually go to the ones in the south in Rio and Sao Paulo… the Brazilians all go to the ones in the north, in Salvador and Fortaleza… partly to get away from all of the tourists and gringos who have now taken over Rio with their fanny packs, disposable cameras, bad sunburns.)

So on to the interesting part… the picking up Brazilian girls:

1) Brazilians are obscenely aggressive. As my friend and travel companion put it, “What constitutes flirting here would probably get you arrested in parts of the US.” And that’s not really an exaggeration. Guys would regularly OPEN girls by trying to make out with them, pulling their hair, grabbing them and just dragging them away, etc. This was normal and constant. A particularly hot girl may literally get guys grabbing her and trying to kiss her every 2-3 minutes.

As for the women, they are extremely aggressive as well… if they like you. You know that little eye contact game that US and European girls play with you? Where they may look at you, but if you make eye contact, they look away and pretend they didn’t see you, because it might demonstrate too much interest?

Yeah, Brazilians don’t have that. If a girl is looking at you and you look at her, she will stare you down like you’re a goddamn steak and she hasn’t eaten in months. Sometimes they’ll grab you, grab your ass, caress you — I had one girl follow me for a few blocks and tell me in her horrible English, “You are beautiful man.”

Pretty awesome, right? Well… one thing is universal, and that’s that the chicks who really want you are rarely the ones you want. Not to say ALL of the girls who did this to me were ugly, but uhh… yeah, most of them were… some of them exceedingly so.

2) The idea that all Brazilians are ridiculously hot is a myth. This will probably end up being a post of its own, but I describe the hotness of women in foreign countries in two different ways: mean attractiveness and range of attractiveness. For instance, the US has a very wide range of attractiveness with its women (hideously ugly to total smoke show, often in the same club), whereas continental Europe has a pretty narrow range: most of them are somewhat fit and decent-looking, but it’s rare to see one that just blows your mind.

Brazil has an EXTREMELY wide range. I saw some of the most ridiculously hot girls I’ve seen in months while I was there. I also saw tons of disgustingly hideous creatures. So I don’t think there’s any single blanket statement you can throw over them, as they vary widely. They DO tend to have amazing asses, and they all seem to be born with the ability to shake them better than any white girl ever could. Which is always cool.

3) Making out in Brazil is akin to a handshake. I figured this out the second night I was there, and for about an hour, it was an extremely exciting discovery, but it actually ended up bumming me out.

In a crowded environment with tons of Brazilian girls, machinegun-making out with girls is actually pretty damn easy. You can rack up 2-3 an hour without a whole lot of effort. Just walk around, catch eyes with girls staring at you. If they’re cute, approach them, spit the 2-3 sentences you know in Portuguese, grab her and start making out. Once in a while they head turn you. But rarely. One immediately mentioned having sex somewhere after a mere minutes (didn’t happen; see below).

But the makeout thing is a double-edged sword. On the one hand, it’s fun because you can rack up like 12 makeouts in one night if you want. But on the other hand, since it’s so meaningless to them, it never leads anywhere. They almost always just kind of smile and walk away, not really caring either way what just happened.

4) Carnaval logistics are about as bad as they can possibly get. In a way, Carnaval is torture, because it presents you with literally an ENDLESS stream of hot Brazilian girls, for literally 12 hours a day for six days straight, but then offers more or less no possible way to pull them. The only exception I can think of is if you luck out and she knows English and you’re able to get her to invest in the interaction a bit, which I was never fortunate to stumble across.

With 2.5 million people in the streets, it’s unbearably packed in most streets. It’s impossible to move around and takes forever to get anywhere. Our apartment was literally a five minute walk from the parade route in daylight, but took 30-45 minutes to get there at night. Cabs are out of the question because of the crowd, and you constantly get separated from people because of the chaos.

Throw on top of that a SERIOUS language barrier and pushing anything further than about three minutes felt borderline impossible. And with so much mayhem and music going on, and little to no investment in you (making out means nothing, remember?), they get bored and scamper away.