Caipirinhas and I don't see eye to eye

For the uninitiated, the caipirinha is a cachaca-based alcoholic drink (cachaca being an extremely strong Brazilian version of rum).  It is the most popular distilled alcoholic drink in Brazil.  The drink is traditionally made by crushing up pieces of lime and sugar in a glass, then mixing in ice and filling the rest of the glass with the previously mentioned cachaca.  It can also be made with vodka and pretty much any fruit the barman can manage to pulverize into the glass.  The strawberry one is particularly good - especially since it completely masks the taste of the alcohol.


Caipirinha is an extremely potent drink.  If you haven't been to Brazil, you may think that you've already tried it at some snazzy West End bar and it wasn't really that bad.  Trust me, that wasn't a caipirinha.  In England, there are specific measures for shots of liquor that pubs and bars have to stick to.  In Brazil, there are no such measures.  Here, they don't serve caipirinhas in piffly little whiskey glasses, they serve them in what looks like a half-pint glass (sometimes bigger).


Anyways.  I went out to a very cheesy gay bar on Monday night.  As I surveyed the 18/19-year-old clientelle and listened to the godawful American pop music pumping out of the sound system, I thought to myself: "I'm going to need a lot more alcohol in my bloodstream to enjoy this".  So, I decided to order a caipirinha.  Apparently I ordered one with vodka (or so I'm informed).  I drank it sort of quicklyish and started enjoying myself a bit more.  I then began slurring, the room started spinning, I went out for a cigarette and felt nauseous, and finally I went downstairs and fell asleep at a table.  My girlfriend had to physically accost me for my swipe card at the end of the evening(/morning?) to pay the bill.  I do remember watching a bit of the drag show.  She did a stage dive.


It seems that every time I have a caipirinha (or two) I end up falling asleep.  That happened on Friday when I had two of them....and back in March when I had three.


Basically, I need to steer clear.  I'm supposed to be going to The Week on Saturday night and falling asleep on the dancefloor is never a good look.

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.