Two Beers and a Pretzel

In the bus from Mission Beach to Cairns (pronounced ‘cans’), I ran into Chris (the Paul Newman look-alike) from the sailing trip.  Being from West London, he says things like:  “Ay geeza, itsa weekend.  We’ll get proppa pissed tonight and land some birds.”  Translation for Americans:  “Hey buddy, it’s Friday.  Let’s go to the pub and try to meet some girls.”

In the hostel, Chris runs up to me and says he’s in a room with a guy who knows me.  He was explaining to the guy that he didn’t know anyone on the bus until “this American bloke from my sailing trip got on.”  The guy listening stopped him and said “You mean Sean?”.  Yep…  with very few American’s on Australia’s East coast right now – I’m almost a D-list celeb.  It turns out that a bunch of the guys and Corinna from Surf Camp were in this same hostel.  Two of them are leaving the next day and want to go out and celebrate.

So Chris and I started the night at 7:30, walking to the bottle shop (liquor store) to get some beers to start the night.  We were going to meet the other guys in town, so by 9:00 we made the 5 minute walk into town and found the Irish Pub.  The other lads weren’t there, but as we walked in a cute girl invited us to a pub crawl that was just starting.  $20, 6 bars, free drinks and pizza, and drinking games with prizes.  BINGO – we have a plan.

A few pubs and games  into the crawl I get a text message from Corinna at a different bar.  The guys are wondering where we are because they’re getting ready to go to bed (it’s only midnight).  So Chris and I get our free shots at Rhinobar and head to the Woolshed to meet the others for a quick drink before rejoining our pub crawl.  After seeing the boys off in style and a few good toasts, we got back to the Rhinobar just in time for a “So you think you can dance” contest.  The girl organizing the pub crawl dragged me into it.  There were 4 from our pub crawl, and 4 from another group.  6 Brits, 1 Frenchman, and me.  The MC chooses a contestant and calls out a dance style.  You introduce yourself and where you are from, then you have to perform that style for 45 seconds on a small stage above the dance floor with appropriately matching music.

The first girl does 45 seconds of lame, white, British girl Hip Hop.  A Brit guy has to do country line dancing.  Another girl does techo rave dancing.  The French guy had to be a male stripper.  Another girl did Irish dancing.  Another guy does a pathetic Michael Jackson imitation.  Then the next to last guy does 50′s sock hop dancing, but has no idea how to do anything like the twist.

I am the last one to dance.  I introduce myself as Sean from the United States, and the crowd (of mostly Brits) boos me…  The MC announces that I am performing BALLET!!!  Holy crap, I was hoping for breakdancing or swingdancing…  I have no idea what the song was, but I did the arms in a halo and spin on your toes.  I ran across the stage doing jumping splits (kind of).  I did back flips and front flips.  Picked up a girl and held her over my head.  More flips and kicks.  At the end, everyone was cheering.  I though it was pretty good to go from boos to cheers in 45 seconds and would have been happy with that.

Then the MC goes thru the dancers and asks the crowd to applaud for the best dancer.  There is standard whooping and applauding for everyone.  I am again last.  When he calls me to the front and announces “The ballet guy from America”, I was almost knocked over by the eruption of sound.  I felt like I just scored the winning touchdown in the Superbowl, or a winning last second half court shot in the NCAA Tourney.  It was nuts.

After being overwhelmed by screams and cheers, I could barely hear the MC over the mic telling everyone that I was the winner of a seven day trip to Fiji!!!! HOLY CRAP!!!  Freaking FIJI!!!!

I can honestly say that a year ago I never expected that I would ever enter a dance contest at backpacker party bar on the great barrier reef, win over the crowd, and win a trip to Fiji.

Now…  well, sometimes it seems like this kind of stuff happens far to often to be random luck…  This night ranks up there with “Spring Break ’95″, “Fraternity Ski Trip”,  “Oktoberfest”, “Duty Free Vodka and Cranberry Juice”, “My first 24 hours in Vegas with Will”, “Casino Winnings at Steve’s Bachelor Party”, “It started at an Irish Pub in Florence, Italy”, and “Searching for Food in Prague at 1AM”.  To that illustrious list I can now add “I won a trip to Fiji at a backpacker bar dance contest in Australia”.

Yes, I am having a lot of fun!!!

I really have no idea how I can ever go back to a suburban desk job – regardless of what it pays.

I just have to figure out when I can go to Fiji since literally 12 hours before dancing I had just booked my tickets to Thailand and India.  I’m thinking Nov or Dec on my way home from the 2nd half of this trip.  I probably won’t have enough money left to do Europe properly, so I may swing back thru SE Asia since I’m really cutting that short, and that’s a place where everyone who’s been there raves about it.

This city has redeemed itself…

As tourist pub crawls go, this one started oddly.  You pay at the hostel, then they give you the address of a park on the other side of town and tell you that the bus leaves from there in 30 minutes.  I figured the bus would take me there, but I apparently made a few erroneous assumptions in my logic.

I met an Irish couple before we attempted navigating the Buenos Aires subway system.  That worked, but we still had to walk 20 minutes to the park.  Once you get there, it’s pretty obvious which crowd of people are the tourist gringos.

There were a log of Brazilians and Brits on the crawl, as well as girls from Sweeden, Germany, Chicago, Alabama  and Texas.  Fun crowd.

The tour company actually posts photos on the web at http://www.pubcrawlba.com and http://picasaweb.google.com/pubcrawlBA3

I don’t think last nights pics are up yet.

We started in the park with free beer and pizza.  The organizers gave us bracelets to identify the crawlers.  We walked to 3 pubs where everyone on the tour got a free welcome shot and discounted drink prices.  After the 3rd pub we boarded a bus to the disco.

The last club had a hip-hop DJ from NYC.  Kind of annoying, actually.  I’m not much for that type of place, except that an old school break-dance fight broke out.  Some of them were pretty good…

The Sweedish girls and Brazilian guys held me back from breaking out my old white-boy moves from my years in Detroit.  Actually, I just couldn’t find anyone to do the Ghostbusters breakdance (where you lay on the floor and someone grabs your feet and runs around in a circle).

I left the disco at 4 am with a taxi full of Brazilians.  Back at the hostel, we ran into a few other crawlers and set off to find the Argentinean equivalent of a Waffle House.  On the main avenue (supposedly the largest avenue on the world), we found  one open place near the famous obelisk.

A Brit, Brazilain, Texan and I had grilled ham & cheese.  I had water.  A few of them actually drank more beer.  I went to bed around 5:30 AM and had to be up before 11 for checkout (a single room is like $60/night, so I switched into a dorm with a bunch of the Brazillians I met for $13/night).

I’m leaving right now for the bike tour!!