Dating Dos and Don'ts: Speed Dating 101

A couple of my good friends collaborated on a speed dating event that was hosted at Divino last week.  I tagged along to help out with registration and sanity maintenance.  As guys are by far the flakier gender, many who RSVPed to the event didn't show and we were scrambling to call friends to come partake.  (Clearly it's a terrible hardship to ask single guys to hang out with 15-20 good looking, eligible women on the prowl for which the ratio is skewed in their favor.)

As I wasn't expecting to meet the love of my life there (no disrespect to the guy selection, I'm just extremely picky AND had the opportunity to scope out the options as they registered AND was already friends with 1/3 of the guys in attendance) I was ready to have some fun with these speed conversations.  A few of my friends who came out in support (and the potential for awesome stories) and I came up with some surefire conversation starters in case of duds.  I mean who doesn't bring up unicorns, LARPing, Renaissance fairs, and zombies on a first date?  Hmmm, maybe this is why I don't date that often.... (For those of you non-geeks out there, LARPing is live action role playing and is most commonly affiliated with the Dungeons and Dragons crowd.  And for the record, I have never LARPed.  Which is more than some of those in attendance at this event could claim, you know who you are.)

Dating Dos and Don'ts: Take 2

So I recently read a blog from a woman who said that if a guy who is chatting up a woman has a significant other then they should take the responsibility to tell the chatee within 30 minutes.  As someone who has spent entire evenings having nice conversation with gentlemen who proceed to flirt shamelessly but don't have any follow through I agree this is just the courteous thing to do.  This is not to say that I wouldn't continue having an interesting conversation with said gentleman and am not even saying that it's not ok to be a flirt (as I'm usually attracted to guys who are more outgoing and flirtatious), but I do agree that it's in everyone's best interest to casually mention a girlfriend in the conversation.  It doesn't have to be an awkward, "So, you know, I have a girlfriend" type thing.  It could just be "Oh, yeah I really liked XYZ, I saw/did that/went there with my girlfriend."  I'm certain that the girlfriend at home would greatly appreciate her existence being made known.  As someone who experienced this occurrence rather recently, let's call him Nne Macho, it would have been nice to know that despite his flirtation and nonstop attentions he actually had a girlfriend.  I would have been happy to conversate with this friend of a friend despite this fact, but would appreciate knowing that it had no potential to go anywhere.

The day the rose colored glasses came off

As this blog is intended to be about my life abroad, the good and the bad, I have decided to post about something that happened to me recently.  As everyone who decides to move abroad knows, security is often a issue and of heightened concern.  Nairobi, among many other cities around the world, has a very high crime rate.  Most of this is petty crime (pickpocketing and cell phone theft) but there is also a level of violent crime as well (armed robberies and carjackings).  I was fully aware of this when I decided to live here and am very conscious of day to day security concerns and I take my personal safety very seriously.  (As some of you know, I left a position that required me to move to Juba, Southern Sudan because of a lack of security measures implemented by the organization I was working for, so I am not one to jump into a high risk situations without precautions in place.)