Online Dating: A Very Biased Review of Tinder, Bumble, OkCupid and Coffee Meets Bagel

"Now where is my bagel?"

Despite being busy with fun stuff like training Brazilian jiu-jitsu and working, I am single and thus receptive of going out on a date every once in a while. And thanks to various mobile apps and online dating services, at times I happen to be dating quite actively.

Online dating used to be weird. I remember the days when it wasn't strange to suggest lying to your families about how you met, if you met your partner online. Today, so much of people's lives happens online, that online dating has successfully claimed its own sweet spot in our collective cyberspace as well. It is no longer much stranger than updating friends on what you ate or what you thought about the latest Marvel movie.

Online dating websites are still alive and well (or so I've heard), but it's online dating apps where it's at these days. I also find most of my dates online. My social circle, although not small by any means, happens to consist of people who are already settled, happily or otherwise. I work from home and spend a lot of time training BJJ, which limits my time and, indeed, opportunity to meet someone new in the wild (although things happen). So I turn to online dating again and again, despite not having much luck with the most popular dating apps out there.

After all, dating is fun, even if it doesn't bring desired results.

Oddly, when it comes to finding people online, I do best with Reddit. I owe Reddit several very close and very treasured friends, several casual relationships and one full-blown ex-boyfriend with whom I don't talk anymore. These are all stories worth telling, but not today.

Great Wolf Lodge: Being Single in These Trying Times

Not sure if you could check into Great Wolf Lodge by accident, but I'd certainly count it as one if you were single - like I am. I can't help but wonder if there's even one more single person staying in the lodge right now. How do you even get here without a ring on your finger and a little cutie-patootie in a pink swimming suit in tow? Or blue swimming trunks. Or waterproof diapers. Or whatever.

There are some 400 suites in the resort, so it is statistically likely that at least some of them contain single people. Single friends. Single moms. Single dads. Single aunties and uncles, perhaps? Third wheels who end up being pillars of support to tired moms and dads ecstatic to be on vacation but equally eager to catch a water slide ride by themselves and not carry the whole 30 pounds of toddler around all the time. Why else come with anyone but your spouse and children?

That's approximately how I feel about my brother and his lovely wife bringing me along. Three adults per one child is the minimum requirement for all involved to have some fun at Great Wolf Lodge - taking turns at fun, perhaps, but fun. Watch the little angel shoot a water gun at other babies while the parents soak in the hot tub; switch places; cannonball down a giant vortex thing; rinse; repeat.

I am genuinely, painfully curious if any single people are present here. I'd like to hang out. Any non-parent with enough patience to be here is someone I'd probably share a beer with. Preferably in a bar. Wouldn't it be nice to have an actual place for adults to go to to have said beer or a glass of wine? But alas - no nightlife at Great Wolf Lodge after hours!

Oh the after hours. The waterpark is shut, the arcade is winding down, all "restaurants" are closed. Kiddies are in bed, exhausted from the day of mayhem, all that splashing and squealing (weeeeeeee!). Dead silence falls all around. The after hours begins... at 9:30 pm or so.

What's a single girl to do?

Well, spoiler alert: nothing really. There is nothing for me to do at Great Wolf Lodge after 9 pm apart from drinking in the room. A bottle of Rioja Reserva 2010 is nice, but boring.

Some friendly company right about now would be so awesome. Someone who isn't already asleep. (Or married.) Since I bet there are some (see above), we could have a nightcap together, if only there was a place for us to go. Not that I'm asking for drunken debauchery opportunities. Just a meeting place.

I like the vibe of Great Wolf Lodge, I really do. The family-friendly theme is valid and exciting. It's great fun with my nephew. But it's also thoroughly nuclear family-oriented and I feel I have no place here, being single and all, unless I leave after the waterpark closes and everyone settles for Storytime.

Maybe I should just take this opportunity to go to bed early myself. That's a rare luxury these days, is it not?

Writing, Consigo and My Other Plans

Currently in YYZ and enjoying some spring warmth at last! (Yes, it's May. Get your weather act together, Toronto.)

Not much travelling has been happening in the last year or so, while I have been working on getting my professional life in order. I have been writing full time for the last 12 months, but only recently began zeroing in on what I actually enjoy doing as a (technical) writer.

Blogging - check.

Copy writing - check.

Help sections and articles - check.

Resume writing - not so much, although I'm still happy to create a kickass CV for anyone who wants one.

I am also neck deep in helping run a tiny accounting firm in Toronto called Consigo, whose goal is to get a foot in the door of the exciting world of online bookkeeping and taxes. We are proudly an online-only service provider with transparent pricing and super-friendly people. So if you need an accountant to take care of your books, you know where to look now ;)

Apart from writing and Consigo, I intend on updating YYZ-BCN way more often from now on. Stay tuned for more travel advice and more moments of conventional wisdom!

There, I Said It: Feel Free to Be a Tourist

Much has been said and written on the subject of being, I quote, "a traveller, not a tourist". Tourists, purportedly, beat the beaten paths to death, take selfies with the Big Ben, eat on Las Ramblas, probably speak only one language and in general don't know shit about life.

Whereas, you know, true Travellers go only where the locals go. Travellers don't book tours or use travel agents. Travellers speak twenty languages, find the best latte without uttering a word of English, and would never, ever, EVER set foot in a McDonald's lest they be considered tourists. That's, like, so gross!

What a load of bullshit.

It has always rubbed me the wrong way how people would recoil from doing things by themselves. Going to movies alone? Horror. Travelling by themselves? Unthinkable. I'd like to claim that I never understood why, but I do. Solitude, for the unaccustomed and little self-aware, can be uncomfortable and scary. Solitude is a skill, and so is solo travel, which I am absolutely in love with. I prefer travelling solo, and I also have a strong aversion to others telling me what to do and how to do it when I travel.

This crude, cruel and unnecessary distinction between tourists and travellers illustrates the same idea: that somehow one way of doing things is better than the other, is better than another. That you absolutely need to defy the mainstream to get the most out of your trip or vacation. That if you stick to the well-known, conventional even, you are automatically a lesser individual - less adventurous, less resourceful, less open.

And let me tell you to screw that. Do what you feel like, be it when travelling and otherwise. (Don't litter though.) I just can't stress it enough: please do what you truly, really want to do when you are on a trip. You don't have to go to that major art gallery just because the guidebook told you it was "a must-see". You don't have to go out of your way to find a quirky place for lunch when you're next to a wide avenue full of places that don't shutter mid-day. You are under no obligation to visit any museum, any sight, any park. You really aren't.

Yet, when we get ready to travel, that's what we are conditioned to do. Make a list of places according to what everyone else said we should do, and go see them. This isn't to say we don't enjoy what we end up seeing. But I have a feeling that too many people on the road feel pressured to do certain things instead of undertaking some activity that they could quite possibly enjoy way more.

What is the point of riding the tourist bus if you are more inclined to go sketch the sea on the beach while getting drunk on beer at one o'clock in the afternoon?

What is the point of touring trendy cafes when you'd rather just have a big steak and chill in your hotel after dinner?

Who has the right to tell you to go visit that church, no matter how splendid its Neo-Gothic apses may be, when you enjoy shopping at local markets and haggle for cheap vintage posters instead?

How have we become so complacent to let anyone, ANYONE, tell us what to occupy ourselves with when we travel? How have we let others, who know so very little of our habits, passions and preferences, to decide what is fashionable and what is not for us to do when we go away on a plane? Why, why would we listen without consulting our own ideas first?

Here is a sweeping generalization of the day: there are no tourists nor travellers. There are people who either decide to go at their own pace and discover things that matter to them most or those who are lured, lulled, tricked into following someone else's path. That's the difference. The pre-defined path may be hipster or Lonely Planet, it really matters not. The pre-defined path is the one that may not be as awesome as the one you may choose to take if you just pause to listen and ask yourself what you, in all earnest, would like to do on your trip.

Please sleep in till noon if you want to. Please go on a pub crawl if you feel like it. Please drop everything else and visit art museums for hours and days. Please eat lobster for breakfast and sandwiches for dinner if that's what you're into. Forget convention and forget trends. Do. What. The. Fuck. You. Want.

And here's hoping that every travel will be an unforgettable one for you this way.

Lunch in Valencia

I had an extraordinary lunch in Valencia today. So extraordinary, in fact, that it warrants its own blog post, not a handful of tweets (no matter how much I love Twitter).

I also love Foursquare, and those who have known me long enough are aware of how fanatical I can get about my check-ins and how furious I was when the app was split into two. This, however, is not the time to rant about Swarm (which did improve a lot since its release). Foursquare got worse in my opinion - it's slow, buggy and clunky, but I still use it because we've got history, the app and I. I'm a Superuser Level 2 (humblebrag). Four and a half years worth of check-ins, ratings and tips are in there. I like making lists. And whenever I am in a new place and hungry, I use the app to find nice places to eat.

Foursquare can be a hit and miss for restaurant recommendations, since it's based on other people's opinions of them, and opinions are subjective as hell. But the hivemind works sometimes: when Foursquare is a hit, it's platinum.

That was a long winded way to say that I discovered an amazing place for lunch using the app today. I checked into my hotel in Valencia and, running out of time before places started shuttering post-lunch, picked two promising restaurants that were right next to each other on a nearby street. The first place looked too expensive even for me in the holiday-goddamit-I'll-have-what-I-want mood, so I settled for the second one.

Their lunch menu deal was a tasting menu. Imagine that? For 13.50€ plus drinks. No choosing dishes; they only gave me the menu to ensure I was okay with eating what they were offering. I just said yes and was subsequently presented with the following:

• cream of something soup
• tiny veal kebabs with tzatziki that was fresh fresh fresh
• a squid and vegetables taco in the softest bread shell
• the absolutely damn unexpected rice with green peas, egg and sashimi
• apple purée with cookie ice-cream and yogurt mousse. In a jar.

Never had anything like it in a seemingly Mediterranean restaurant, which it wasn't, turns out. Fusion? Asian? No labels necessary. I asked the restaurant manager, Catina, to reserve a table for me tomorrow night. I actually have a rule that I don't eat in the same place twice when travelling, unless I'm in some remote location that has no other options (like a few towns in Priorat, for example). I fully intend to break this rule tomorrow night, because if this was lunch, I want, no, I NEED to try their dinner.

No food pictures to illustrate the post. Was too busy eating.

El Delicat
Carrer del Comte d'Almodóvar, 4, 46003 València
963 92 33 57

Opinions Good. Reviews Bad.

Writing about food is hard, and whoever said it wasn't is pretentious or lying. Writing about food is hard, because it's an attempt to describe something that's indescribable. (You're better off snapping a picture and posting it to Instagram. Maybe.) If you write about food in a restaurant review, you also present your writing as a solid and objective look at something that can only be subjective. I have a big problem with that. It feels like opinions are being shoved down my throat, and this is not the feeling I want to associate with food.

What are being passed off as restaurant reviews are opinions - glorified and authoritative sometimes, but opinions. Of course, the same can be said about pretty much any other review - wine, film, music album, a poem, a novel, your friend's new haircut.

Are opinions wrong? No. But when it comes to entertainment and hospitality, opinions sometimes count for too much while offering very little. People who share them elevate their experiences and thoughts to the level of universal usefulness and applicability, but these experiences can never be truly universal - there are 7 billion people on the planet, after all. And restaurant reviews are the worst offenders, because there is nothing more subjective than sensory experience of food. It is dependent so much on everything else besides the food itself, that the experience may not even be applicable to the next time you, the reviewer, visit that eatery, let alone to someone else's visit.

Everyone's entitled to their own opinion, yada yada. I agree. Everyone is. What irks me is the belief that opinions and experiences transfer. The belief that subjective can ever become objective if imparted by someone smart, someone older, someone with 10 thousand Twitter followers. A trusted source is a better source when it comes to facts, but food experience can never be a fact. Wine experience can never be a fact. Even experience of weather can differ a whole lot.

The jist of the post is not "Don't read restaurant reviews". Read whatever you want to read, but take it with a grain of salt and don't let it limit you. Don't feel bad if you hear a bad opinion disguised as a review of a place you like. Please don't think that you shouldn't drink a certain wine if someone said it wasn't good. You can drink anything you damn well please (if you are of legal drinking age). Ain't no such thing as a bad wine or a bad dish - if you like it.

If I post something about a restaurant I went to, just remember that everything I say about the food or drinks specifically is just my opinion and you can safely ignore it if you feel like it. Better yet - share your own opinion with me, and we can have a discussion.

Opinions are great and interesting and open doors to interesting debates. Opinions aren't great when they shove something down the public's throat - no matter how subtly. Just share tips on when to beat the line at Uncle Tetsu's Cheesecake in Toronto or recommend a place to eat if you want soft jazz music and table candles. Don't tell me if eggs benedict are too buttery - maybe I like them just this way.

(I'm aware that these are not eggs benedict. It was a delicious potato salad from Cañota, Barcelona.)

Priorat

It's been quite a while since I first opened a bottle of wine from Priorat. I won't claim that that was the moment I realized I had to come here, but I always knew that I would. Priorat is one out of the two wine regions in Spain to ever claim the coveted DOQ marking for their bottles (the other being La Rioja). DOQ stands for Denominacion d'Origen Qualificada, which is a high honour in the wine world: many other good-quality wine regions obtain only the DO standing - Denominacion d'Origen, without the Qualificada part.

Wines from Priorat are special. They are rich, full-bodied, full-Spanish, very expensive to the local standard (to the Canadian - not very). They are the wines with character, with a touch of history. They are bold and demanding. They are a pleasure to drink.

So my dad and I finally got the time to drive up to Priorat for the weekend. The wine region is found in Tarragona and is only an hour and a half drive away from Barcelona. But it is secluded, so solitary, so perfectly void of human noise, that is is very difficult to describe how comfortable we feel here. I suspect that we've been craving this kind of solitude for a while now, and this stay in the middle of nowhere - only the stars and the best wine in the world to keep us company - arrives just in time.

We've been welcomed with arms open wide. I honestly cannot remember if I've ever been treated with such warmth and genuine interest elsewhere in Catalonia. Today we had lunch in Falset, which is the capital of Priorat, and stopped at the bodega Buil & Giné for the night - and at both places we were (and are) taken such good care of, that I find it hard to believe we will need to leave. Wine here flows not by the bottle, but by the barrel. Hospitality is truly boundless.

It's been a while since I first opened a bottle of wine from Priorat. It's been a while since I wanted to stay longer somewhere so bad as in Priorat. Good call, Dad, good call.