Nightlife #1

This is probably the first of quite a few posts on my experience of nightlife here.  I like going out.  In London I was more specifically interested in EDM (electronic dance music) and gay clubs (which mostly play either pop or house music - my preference being the latter).  However, I am interested in most genres of music.  London just has a particularly good dance scene.

On Saturday night I went out for a birthday get-together thingy for our host Fernando's boyfriend.  We went to a place in Jardim Paulista called 'DJ Club Bar'.  As a native English speaker from England, I found the name of the bar highly misleading.  The words 'DJ' and 'Club' usually denote some form of danceable music of which there was none.  Well, not what I was expecting anyway.

The ground floor (there were three floors in total) consisted of a few seats and some retro arcade games: Virtua Street Fighter, another game like VSF, and two proper old-fashioned pinball machines.  Fernando is a massive gamer, so we played video games while we were waiting for the club room downstairs to open up.  Upstairs was a slightly quieter bar, but nothing particularly interesting.

We went downstairs into the club room about 1am when it opened.  The music was British and American indie/rock.  Most of the songs were instantly recognisable to me and I spent the whole night singing the lyrics to practically every track played.  I heard: Metallica, Guns 'N' Roses, The Cure, The Smiths, Morrissey, Talking Heads, Simple Minds, Kings Of Leon, Yeah Yeah Yeahs and Florence + The Machine, amongst many others.  After a very strong caipirinha, I got over the initial weirdness of dancing to late-80's indie and got 'on down' as Fernando kept saying.  The dance floor was rammed.  The atmosphere was great.  Everyone knew the lyrics to all the songs despite the fact that most of them had great difficulty in stringing together a sentence in English.

I ended up getting pretty drunk (bebedo - I'm not going to forget that word quickly) after forcing myself to finish a second caipirinha and I had to escape to the ground floor pinball room to get some air before I passed out.  The whole group came to find me about 5 minutes later which I felt very guilty about.  After it was clear I was having issues standing up straight, we went home, played Just Dance 3 on the wii for about half an hour before I retreated to my bed about 5am to pass out.  Everyone else carried on without me in the living room.

Maybe next time I'll stick to one caipirinha and a beer (gnat's piss), if I feel like having a second drink.