Hello ! Its Rajgoldwin, pleased to meet you all !

[rajgoldwin]

Rather a standard introduction. I have been following up your posts as a nonmember for a year now, off and on, chuckling at some of the comments and learning from the serious questions and serious replies. people everywhere are the same, and FSU woman may be no different, i thought. but cultural and maybe financial differences, exist.

I live in Mauritius , an island nation. it is in the Indian Ocean. a tropical country.

I lost my wife to cancer 5 years ago. we were very devoted to each other.
it was difficult for me at that time, as I was going through a difficult time in business too. friends left me in those difficult times. whom i had helped a lot before.

last year i decided, after seeing the beautiful pictures of Slav women, to try to write to a few and see. I did not know about scammers at that time. I spent a lot of time, writing to scam women ) . I was really a greenhorn. Later I will relate some faux-pas and amusing incidents i went through, due to being green, and not knowing which lady was real or which was an electronic replica.

I visited a few ladies, last year, and witnessed the V-day celebrations in Russia too. 4 Russian cities, to be exact, and quite many I passed through. i will post the links to these photos later, my hobby (one of them) is photography, and i had taken many photos on my travels, including plane routes, train routes, different airports etc which may be of use to other travellers like myself who may panic at having to really leave the security of their keyboards and visit the ladies to whom they have been writing.

I was in for a shock when I really met the few ladies I had corresponded with for periods like 3 months to 1 year. the lady I wrote to for a year, who was first on my list, and looked really wonderful in all the photos she sent me on the internet, turned out to be really different looking from the photos. she herself commented on this aspect when showing me her pictures in her apartment. I just could not bring myself to believe that this was the same lady i had been writing to. I was really disappointed, and it was an anti-climax, in a cold city in Siberia, with me suffering from a viral cold at that time. and nothing to eat that i could relish, there.

I got impressed by one lady at Omsk, 29 years old , and 5 ft.7 inches ( I have a thing for tall girls, and I think that a girl should at least be able to touch the tip of a man's nose with the top of her head, if you know what I mean ), she was very pretty and intelligent, and gave me the impression of being very capable (in her own city) and invited her to visit me. but this impression was to be reversed in some respects when she visited me later after 2 months to my country, when I conducted an extensive tour for her, and also as my work also involved touring, at that time.

by the way, i am frequently seeing references to age difference between the man and the lady. this is of practical interest. I was 45 years old when i invited her, i paid all the expenses and trip tickets, and made sure she never had to pay for anything. but nothing came of it, and i will post the details of this later. She had a terrific language problem, and did mention it seriously. Also she felt responsible to earn and support he mother and elder sister, these were afterthoughts, when she started thinking carefully. Although I learnt a few russian words, and still learning the language and culture, at that time, My main communication with her was with a lingvosoft translator program that ran on Windows mobile OS on my pocket PC (Siemens SX 66)  , which was a wonderful program and saved me many times when i was touring Russia. She showed a strange reluctance to speak in English, even when i taught her some words to use when shopping with her. it puzzled me. I had to be very patient with her, in many situations, too.

Let us all share and learn !

R.Goldwin
------------------------------------

[BillyB]

I was in for a shock when I really met the few ladies I had corresponded with for periods like 3 months to 1 year. the lady I wrote to for a year, who was first on my list, and looked really wonderful in all the photos she sent me on the internet, turned out to be really different looking from the photos.

Welcome Rajgoldwin,
  Men aren't the only ones that deceive others by way of photos on the internet. I always ask women for additional photos for a number of reasons. To get a better idea the woman I'm communicating with is in possession of more than one or two photos that can easily be stolen from another profile, to see photos that are not their best or touched up agency photos that make a woman looked better and younger than she actually is, and most importantly I ask for additional photos to gauge how interested the woman is in me. If she's willing to take the time to write to my personal email, then she's investing her time for ME, honors my request and doing something for me more than she does for other men. I won't visit a woman if I don't get to see more photos of her and her life.

[rajgoldwin]

Thanks for your comments, BillyB.
Actually this lady had photos on a dating site, and they were good !
they showed her in different poses and all were good IMHO.
later, after 3 months she sent me a photo where she was learning to drive a car, she looked good in that too. finally 3 months before i went there, she told me she had recent pics taken in a studio in a blue dress, and sent me. they were good too.
but this lady looked quite different when i saw her in the 7am siberian sunlight. on our first meet. in that 5 minutes of our meeting, all our one year correspondence and hopes that i had went into the waste-bin. for politeness i accompanied her to her apartment, met her mum, and was dropped back to my hotel in her car.
I still wonder why she looked so different. but some features i could recognise looked similar to the photos. her mum looked nice in one studio photo, but looked 40 years older, when i saw her. and this lady markets make-up and cosmetics for Dior, maybe she had used plastic makeup (oil-makeup) while going to the photo shoot. she had bad skin, nothing like the photos, and shallow sunken like cheeks, not youthful like in the photos, and hair cut short too, not long like in the photos, and many other differences which i cannot say right-out, but the overall effect was very bad and negative. nobody in his right mind would leave the lovely girls in asia and go to siberia to meet this lady. it was such a waste of time, not to speak of the money. but I did meet many other ladies and they too did not look like their photos. i was not impressed by their beauty, in personal meetings. Only one lady saved my day (and my trip), she looked very pretty even in the meeting, and visited me in my country later too.

Rajgwin

[Chicagoguy]

Welcome Rajgoldwin !

I dated maybe 10 women in Russia and never had a photo problem. I can't explain why I was so lucky. They were all over 50 and maybe should have had even more of a reason to puff themselves up.

Just try what BillyB says and just ask straight out for a current photo. Snapshots should be the best test.

You are already off to a good start and this web page can be a big help.

[RussianWind]

How else should they look in professional photos? Ugly? A photographer will die from starvation then 

[BillyB]

How else should they look in professional photos? Ugly?

No, just realistic. Some women will submit photos of themselves that were taken before the bearing of her two children. Some men will submit photos of himself when he was 20 years younger. It's not how you look, it's how you feel that counts! Right?

Besides one putting their best studio photos and posting them on the internet, the marriage agencies will additionally improve the photos with a computer program such as photoshop. The wrinkles on your face, gone, the bags under your eyes, gone, the ugly birthmark on your face, gone! You will also have a more pleasant skin tone color too. Better photos does get the agency more business and the women more dates.

[RussianWind]

Professional photos do not need any improvement. Any "improvement" will make them only worse

[Chicagoguy]

I don't think RussianWind is aware of what can be accomplished on Photoshop.

[Shostakovich]

Chicago-guy, eh?  I'm one of those - live in Seattle now.  Where you at?  You don't seem to be one of those River-North hipsters.  Park-West?  That's the cheese, in my view.

[RussianWind]

I don't think RussianWind is aware of what can be accomplished on Photoshop.

Yeah... despite of the fact that I use it everyday professionally 

You just don't understand what professional photos are - it is a technique of playing with lights and contrast plus a bit of photoshop, this way photos look very beautiful and naturalistic. If you take just a photo and play in photoshop, the only result you can get is an artificial look - a plastic doll. Of course I am not speaking of "making a little bit better" removing ugly warts, I am speaking of global changings in appearance.

Cheers 

[boaterguy]

There was a lady in my wife's agency that I had a hard time not calling a scammer. She was very well traveled at the expense of many men. Photoshop was her ace in the hole. She portrayed her self as a slender,mid 30's doll. I almost fell on the floor when my wife told me I had met her. In real life she looked 50 and had to be pushing 200 lbs(she described herself as 120-130lbs).

She did get her come up ins one time I know of. A guy paid her way to Jamaica only to leave her with only a hotel room and a ticket home. She had to survive for a week on the hotel breakfast bar.