The Tinder Date From Hell

San Cristo, Chiapas, Mexico

If you find yourself single and surrounded by people speaking a foreign tongue, I know of a language-learning app that can help you: Tinder.

At some point in Guadalajara I was hungover and bored. When you have no job and no girlfriend this is a common condition. At such times it's pretty tempting to bust out the Tinder machine. Which proved to be much more rewarding in Mexico than it had been in the United States.

On the language-learning front, Tinder is far superior to Duolingo. You can do fill-in-the-blank vocabulary quizzes, or you can chat in complete sentences with a gorgeous seniorita. You do the math.

The dates themselves, when they happen, are very low-stakes and usually stress-free. I'm travelling in a foreign country where I don't know anyone. So if I can make a new friend, excellent. If we're attracted to each other and end up sleeping together, even better. And if there's just no spark, at least I get to practice my conversational Spanish.

So that has been my experience in general. In this blog however I'd like to highlight the most bizarre and disastrous Tinder date of my life. More disastrous than the time I spent our first date arguing with an HR rep that the NSA programs leaked by Snowden were a big deal and just because "she had nothing to hide" was no excuse to surrender our right to privacy.

Some background on our pre-date chats: I had a Tinder profile that said something about philosophy - as in I am currently sans responsibilities and have plenty of time for philosophy and chatting. She was a philosophy student so that intrigued her. We made a plan to spend an afternoon walking around Arcotete, a nearby network of hiking trails that follows a river through a tunnel in a mountain.

The first big shocker was the baby. Yes, she had brought a surprise baby along on a first date. She carried him in a sling in front her. He wasn't a newborn, but he also wasn't speaking yet. She boasted to me that his father was British, which horrified me. Was this woman seeking out white men on Tinder to make babies with?

Second surprise was her looks. She was much less attractive in real life than on the internet. That'll happen. Since I don't expect Tinder dates to ever turn physical, that's not the end of the world. I myself am blessed (or cursed, depending on your half-glass of water orientation) with looking better in real life than on the internet. I'm horrible at smiling on command for pictures.

Isabella, whose Tinder name was not-so-cleverly Allebasi, told me that a taxi to Arcotete cost 700 pesos, which surprised me. I had read it should cost no more than 100 pesos. After later consulting with folks at my hostel, turns out her numbers were wildly off. But nevertheless I consented to take a collectivo instead.

Collectivos are big vans that serve as shared taxis. In the city they usually sit around until full before departing. Which is all good and well, but Isabella did not know where to find the collectivos. Which did not stop her from leading me around a Sunday market for 20 minutes in search of them.

By this point I knew I did not want to spend an entire day with her, so I suggested we go to a café instead. It was probably going to rain anyway. She was amenable to that.

On the way to a hypothetical café, we stopped in at several fabric stores. Isabella had plans to redo her kitchen in a "native" style, so she was apparently in the market for fabric. She bartered prices with clerks but never bought anything. I don't think she had money with her. Perhaps she wanted me to buy her fabrics. In any case I'm not a big fan of shopping.

On our search for a café I also learned that she was no longer a student - she hadn't attended university in over a year. Yet she still claimed she had a 3-5 page paper to write on the connection between women, water, and the moon. I asked questions about this but was unable to make any sense out of it. Could be my Spanish was not strong enough. More likely she was batshit crazy.

Eventually we stopped in at a café and ordered teas. The café was packed and Isabella's wailing baby was bringing down the mood a bit, so she did what you'd expect: she breast-fed.

After we finished our teas I desperately wanted to ditch her, but at first I did not. She clearly wanted to continue hanging out, and I felt bad for her. So I let her lead me into another market, where she again compulsively shopped for fabric she could not buy. After a few more minutes of this I finally mustered the courage to tell her I was going home. Es que no me gusta ir de compra. I don't like shopping.

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Later that day I asked at my hostel and without too much trouble at all found the collectivo to Tuxtla Gutierrez. San Cristo is the tourist town above the clouds that all Chiapas tourists are supposed to visit. Tuxtla is the capital of Chiapas 30 minutes away that every travel site encourages you to avoid. There's nothing there. Only about a million people with lives and dreams and desires.

So anyway I went on a Tinder date in Tuxtla and had a much better time with a woman who didn't speak a lick of English. Breast-feeding first date was an outlier. You can trust in Tinder for your second language education.