Dave is…
Sampling the nightlife.
It’s no secret I haven’t gone out as much in Cape Town as I have in other places but tonight for some reason my social calendar was packed. Immediately after work I had to go to goodbye drinks for Olivia who is moving to Joburg to clerk for the Constitutional Court. And that was a lot of fun but I had to duck out early to meet Perdi and head out to Durbanville, in the northern suburbs, to carouse with her friends.
Nat and Perdi on the dance floor
I confess to being a little dubious about this. Perdi is awesome but kind of insane so I wasn’t sure what exactly I was getting myself into and with Jen using the car this weekend and me being all the way out north I was committing myself fully. But it was a pretty good time, albeit bizarre.
Perdi and Chris
We started at an emo bar, which would be strange anywhere but even more so in South Africa. It was reassuring to know though that even here my lack of emo cred is so readily apparent that they all looked at me as if to ask why this guy was here. Granted I was looking at them as if to ask why do you think skinny black jeans and a fucking vest over a t-shirt brings out your sensitive and troubled soul.
Still Perdi’s friends were cool. Chris was out with us, we grabbed Natalie on our way to the bar and another host of people joined us out. Impressively Natalie doesn’t drink. Wait let me rephrase that. Impressively Natalie, who doesn’t drink, seems to enjoy hanging around with idiots whose only focus is drinking (oh and in this bar, their sensitive and troubled souls) and I was to become very reliant on her sober perspective when we ventured to the “club” next door, which is easily the second most bizarre nightlife establishment I have ever been to. (Behind the goth/industrial club that psychotic random Greek kid took me to in Newcastle that time when I had nowhere else to stay)
This picture turned out amazingly well
Really in terms of size, placement and general demeanor it was just a bar that had an open floor and lots of stupid lights instead of tables or chairs but it apparently doesn’t card so it was overrun with high schoolers, or South Africa’s equivalent, dancing like they had just had their first illicit sip of gin filched from their parent’s liquor cabinets. We are talking the kind of place that has a stripper pole in one corner, a “stage” approx 3’x 2’ and a DJ who thinks Lady Gaga’s Pokerface is the hottest spin in town. Oh and they had stars. Lots of glow in the dark star stickers. Which they went around putting on people’s faces. I am not joking when I say if it wasn’t for Natalie I would not have been able to handle it because rarely have I been in a place that so requires a companion to go “WTF” to.
And I thought kids back home acted like idiots. This is why the drinking age in the States is 21, really though they should just be jacking up the clubbing age. That’s what makes people stupid.
Still I managed to laugh uncontrollably and enjoy myself thoroughly while generally avoiding any dancing requirements and when the time finally came to shift to the 24 diner I can’t say I had any complaints. I was out later than I have been the whole month I have been here and at the end of the night I got to crash in a young teenage girls bed with her stuffed animals. (She wasn’t in it; it was just the room available at Chris’)
Misc Notes:
• At the 24-hr diner some of the kids we were with expressed curiosity about what a US drivers license looks like so I passed mine around. There was serious scandal when they discovered I am 27. It blew their minds. Frankly, even now I can decide what is sadder about that moment. The fact that I am so young looking and immature acting that they couldn’t believe I am that old; or the fact that I was hanging around with people so young that my being 27 was a shock to them.
• OK. I GET IT. Michael Jackson is dead. So what? For all intents and purposes beyond selling tabloids the man has been dead since the early nineties. Yes he made some of the greatest pop songs that music will ever seen but that was twenty years ago. All he has done since is changed races and molested little boys. Nevertheless I got a call at 12:30 last night telling me he dead and I got a call at 8am telling me the same thing. I didn’t know my sleep had to be bookended by this announcement. Shit that’s the most calls I’ve gotten since I got over here. I dunno who that reflects worse on him or me.
Chris masters the stripper pole.
• On a related note, everyone is up in arms about Jacko dying, totally overshadowing the fact that Farrah Fawcett just died OF ANAL CANCER. It’s a damn shame, in just about any other week that would have been good for a ton of great jokes, now it’s all just gone to waste.
• On an unrelated note (unless Farrah or Jacko come back as the living dead) I was preaching the gospel of Pride & Prejudice & Zombies to Chris and Nat, two very literary folk, for much of the night. I wish i had brought my copy of the book along so I could lend it to them and change their life forever. This must be the way all those missionaries felt when they came to Africa, just burning with a passion to show the poor savages the light. Cept my light involves ninja zombie reinterpretations of classic literature and their light involved shameless lies and the explotation of a whole continent of people. Though one could argue that Jesus was the original zombie.