So, I never go out to the bars with the sole intention of hitting on girls. I never have, especially alone. Figuring I'm in a new city, and I want to practice talking to women, I figured I'd give it a shot.

I hung out at a friend's house for a bit beforehand, drinking some beer. In hindsight, I should've drank much less as I feel I wasn't there with complete mental acuity. Sidenote, I tried out fire poi for the first time and it was really awesome. The flames dancing around your head, hearing the flames whooshing through the air was really something else.

Anyways, none of my friends really wanted to go out with me, but I was on a mission to give it a shot. I get to the bar, and sit down. There's 2 sets of women on my left and right, 2 of them really hot, 2 of them average and a bit older. I go for the average ones. And i just spark up a conversation. We talk about traveling, what she recommends to eat here, stuff like that. We talk about random stuff some more. She tells me her age (34) and I go how old do you think I am? She guesses it on the dot, I'm 24. Anyways, when I got there it looked like they were on their way out. As they were packing up their food into boxes and stuff, I said to her, you know I think you're pretty sexy. She gives me a hug and says thanks I really appreciate that and said welcome to the city, and recommended me go out back to a different bar that she said would have more younger women.

I go out back, and I see 2 fairly cute girls sitting at the bar around my age. I go up to them and just start talking about random stuff. Apparently the one girl is moving to Manhattan the next day which I thought was really cool. We talked about random stuff, including NYC and other things we found funny. I don't really remember too much what we talked about but i pretty much did the same thing that i did with the other woman, I said i thought she was sexy when we were about to head out. Her friend kinda laughed but the girl i was saying it to said thanks, you're gonna conquer this city just like im gonna conquer NYC. she then gave me a hug and we left.

It's not the best results and it's really only friendly conversation, but I'm still glad I went out and gave it kind of a shot. The hurdle I need to get over next is escalating the conversation, and really initiate the flirting. I'm really really good at talking to random people about a variety of topics, just friendly conversation in general. But I'm not well-versed in flirting specifically. And I guess that's why I'm here! Next time, I'm going to try and get over that fear of actually escalating into something a bit more flirty/sexual. All in all, I do think that I learned from the experience, and that is to try somehow to start flirting. I really don't know how specifically, but I guess you just gotta do it, instinctively.