Around the World in 80 Dates Read Online Free Page A

signing up and asking for basic clarification:
    Does he need to speak English? Would you be willing to go on a ménage à trois with a translator? Hannah, emailing from Budapest
    Giving me a wake up and smell the fertility reality check:
    P.S. You say you don’t want to date men younger than thirty. I have two words for you: sperm motility. If you’re still in the race to have a child before, say, forty-five, you’ll need energetic critters rather than those about to retire. Leslie, emailing from Moscow
    And forcing me to face the facts:
    These are the details of the English lady I was telling you about: I hope she sounds interesting to you. She’s a very nice lady, aged thirty-eight (but this is quite normal in the U.K. to be old and still single)….
    And so read the email trail between Alex and his friend Beaver in Lithuania.
    At the same time that I was being contacted by DWs and their Dates, I was also out looking for myself, spending hours on the Internet researching places or events that might yield my Soul Mate. Anything to do with Love or a love of mine should have potential, I reasoned. I scoured the search engines like an intrepid love detective sleuthing for clues that would help me identify and locate my missing man. In some instances, this threw up dreadful red herrings. I am a huge devotee of the yeast spread Marmite, for example, and thought this might make me compatible with the man who ran a Marmite appreciation website in America:
    I started the Marmite site because I take Marmite into work with me on a Friday (the company I work for supplies breakfast, mainly bagels though we do have toast as well and sometimes yogurt, though I don’t have Marmite with the yogurt. Just the bagels. And the toast, if they’ve run out of bagels). Other than eating Marmite, I write information management and delivery software for the Internet….
    Thankfully, other leads proved to be more fruitful, such as the Costco Soul Mate Trading Outlet, one of the theme camps at the annual Burning Man Festival, held in the Nevada desert. I didn’t totally understand what they were about, but I did manage to establish that Costco was a kind of anarchic dating agency at the festival. The CEO, Rico Thunder, agreed that I could be part of their camp and work on their “front desk” in exchange for some light flirting duties. I felt I’d have some useful expertise to contribute by the time I’d made it through Europe and the West Coast of America to Nevada, plus I fully intended to skim off any suitable Soul Mates for myself. Rico also put me in touch with a Seattle-based audio engineer in TV sports who was one of the Costco crew. He matched my Soul Mate Job Description perfectly and emailed:
    The things you write in your description could have been written by me! What is up with that?
    Love: Cooking, building/restoring cars (just finished an Alfa), music, road trips
    Hate: Working out (still do it), rigid people, being cold for long periods of time, speed bumps
    The only way I could cope with the huge volume of correspondence was to ruthlessly compartmentalize. In the process of establishing a tentative rapport with the desirables and gently filtering out the inadvisables, Europe was given priority over America, which in turn took precedence over Australasia.
    Big picture, that was how I saw my route working: Europe, U.S., Australasia. It wasn’t logical from a geographical point of view, but it made it possible to attend specific events at certain times, plus—as importantly—ensured that I’d always be traveling with the sun. This meant I could stay warm, pack light, and see people at their/my most foxy. There are valid reasons that all the feel-good songs—“Summer Breeze,” “Summer Lovin”—“Summer of ’69”—are written about the summer rather than the miserable winter months. Who looks good with chapped lips and a