OK, now I've got to cast my mind back through the swirling mists of time to Wednesday night. My first Australia Day in the Northern Hemisphere. I suppose the weirdest bit was the whol temperature issue – if there's one thing I've established during my time on this planet, it's that on Australia Day it's always bloody hot, and you're essentially REQUIRED to have a BBQ in a park and drink a load of beer. Well of course we didn't get the day off up here, and it was FREEZING. But it seemed that the optimum course of action was to visit a place I'd never normally go with a clear conscience – a Walkabout pub. So call me a snob, but I just don't go for spray-on atmosphere.
Well anyway I'd organised to meet Nick and Undies there after work, and I figured I'd get out about 6ish. As it happened I got on a bit of a roll, got heaps done, but then looked up and saw that it was about 8pm. Still, I figured it wouldn't be too bad – SURELY not that many people would want to go to a Walkabout, even if it WAS Australia Day ? Hell I only suggested it because they have Bundy on the bar there !
As it happened, several other people had the same idea. In fact, an entire pub full, and then a line of people about 50m long outside. Great. Well, no point in piking out and going home ? How long could a line possibly take to work through ? (Incidentally, it's worth pointing out that I've never queued up to get into a pub before, ever).
I reckon I was inside by about 10:30.
It was pretty cool though – I met these two South African girls in the line, and there was nothing much else to do, so we got talking, and serendipitously the line went past an off-licence (that's Pommy talk for “bottle shop”), so we had a couple of drinks as the line crept slowly forward. It was bloody cold out there, and at one point it started lightly drizzling, but thankfully it didn't graduate into rain. Then it stopped. Then it started again. Oh the thousands of conversational options that presented, trendsetters. Then, it started snowing.
THAT'S RIGHT, IT BLOODY SNOWED, ON ME, ON AUSTRALIA DAY.
Talk about weird. Anyway, there's not too much else to say about Wednesday night – it was just your standard cram-into-a-crap-pub-and-pay-stupid-prices-for-awful-beer type affair. Being Australia Day, the choice of music was mainly Aussie anthems – I think the 2nd or 3rd song I heard was Khe Sanh. It's just bloody inescapable. Then it got weird – for reasons which defy logic, they had some idiot with a keyboard sitting up on stage playing acoustic version of mostly the same songs they'd been playing for the previous hour and a half. Pretty dire stuff.
Apart from that, a top night out.