Day 41 - Being Hip with E

Haters gon' hate

May 19th, 2015

The morning isn’t really worth mentioning, so I'm skipping it. Everything was finally in gear by 4:30pm to get to the recruitment place before they close at 5.

Tonight, the plan is to head to Leederville (Village of Leaders (I made that up, but it sounds plausible)) to a bar called “Hip-E Bar.” It’s backpacker night, which means 1) free drink, 2) free sausage, 3) lots of other foreigners. Thor knows where the place is, so he's the man in charge tonight.

Laurens/Thor at Hip-E Bar

I sign the papers for the recruiters, finding out that I still have more paperwork to do online to finally get a placement. If they were charging me for all of this, I might think they were scamming me, but so far it’s just been a rather slow process. I wander around town striking up conversation with the occasional person and taking pictures of stuff I still have yet to see. After a few wrong turns seeing how the back streets connect, I find myself at Old Shanghai where I grab something to eat. My cupboards are bare and French Alex said he’d drive me to the grocery. What a mate! (they don't say that...)

Brit Daisy, Thor, and Kiwi Shorty

Thor is home as I pass by, so I stop in to check out his new digs and set the plan for the night while eating. He regales me with stories of the crazy night before, after leaving us to return to The Game. Police, French girls, and VIP passes are the short of it. He heads to the gym, and I return the home.

Alex isn’t around, and I only have an hour to get groceries, so I gather his digits from his roommate, Italian Matteo. Alex forgot that he had offered, and said we might be able to do it tomorrow. No worries, I should be alright for the night, I figure. Instead, I edit a handful of posts and get them up there so that I’m a little caught up. At this point, I’m getting close to 20 posts behind. Yeesh.

Aus Rob, Me, Aus Martin

When Thor is ready, we leave from his place, beers in hand. This is relatively normal in this area, drinking in public. Still illegal, I’d rather not risk the fine for no reason, and chug the beer before we leave the shadows. These beers are courtesy of German Berti. Cheers!

We arrive at the club and I have my passport, but I want to start seeing how far I can push the limit and attempt to gain entry with my Canadian drivers license only. I don’t push that hard, and end up having to produce the passport, but it was worth shot.

After grabbing the free drink and finishing the hotdog, we get the night kicked off by talking to a group of four french girls. Laurens got a little luckier than me, as he was speaking to the one with the strongest English while I entertained the 3 more ESL of them through miming and broken french. We leave that group and meet Aussie Rob, a German girl, and an English chick. Rob seems a little... off, to say the least. I have no idea the dynamic, but the English girl tells me that Rob is a friend of the German’s. Ah, ok, sure.

Closing out the Night

Thor and I head over to a table of 3 guys; Jay, Daniel, and Craig. They all sound Aussie, but only one of them is legit Australian, and the others are both immigrants, so they tell me. They’re pretty cool, eventually excusing themselves to go meet women on the dance floor. Sure, I’m down for some Extreme White Guy action (my dance style, in case I haven’t mentioned it).

After dancing a bit, I find Aus Rob sitting at a table with another Australian, Martin. Martin’s pretty cool; he owns his own app dev company, and is the cousin of the creator of Salad Fingers. I meet his other friends, English Daisy, Kiwi Shorty, and Aus Tim (he talked so quickly that I thought he was Irish).

It comes out that they think Rob is my friend. Nah, mate, nah. I start asking around to see if anyone knows Rob from before tonight. Nope, not even the German chick. Hah! He's totally benefitting from some good ol' fashioned pluralistic ignorance. I also find out he’s on, uhh.. I think it was Ecstacy. I’ve never tried, but I do know it’s supposed to be great for dancing. Rob has done it before and never danced while on E. What.

We tried

I steal Daisy’s sunnies off her head and head to the dance floor, real glasses in hand. At this point, momentum is going strong and shits starting to hit the fan. Everyone’s high-fiving me for wearing these ridiculously big women’s sunglasses, while Cory Hart plays on repeat in my head. I couldn’t see shit, no, but that actually makes it easier to forget anyone else is even there. Much easier to pull more ridiculous stunts when you’re extremely nearsighted and artificially blinded.

The night continues like this until we leave around 2:45am. Unlike Canada, a number of clubs here can stay open as late as they want, it seems. The club says “Until Late” which means they will stay open so long as people are still there and still drinking. Yeah, no hard line on when they have to stop serving or anything. This country is huge on penalties for speed limits, and other such regulations… but they’re cool with people being at a club until 5am. No, they’re not entirely related, but it’s strange to see what they have a problem with, enough to legislate, and what they don’t. C’est la vie, I guess.