Another Bar Hopping Weekend

It’s been a slow work week. I’ve been helping the testers with some of their questions and testing roster costing. By Friday, I didn’t have much to do and the client left the office by 4pm. We stuck around until 5pm and headed home. Neil and I dropped our stuff off at the apt. and met Kevin and his wife, Donna, at PJ O’Brian bar in Southgate. I was hungry at this point and held off on drinking before dinner. We went to a nearby restaurant and Donna left for her weekend trip to take mountain biking pictures. It must be fun being a professional photographer.

St. Jerome

I had Coopers beer and samosas for dinner. The food was good but the beer was too bitter. The first stop after dinner was St. Jerome bar that’s situated in the middle an alley way with tarp hanging overhead. There were people dressed as pirates, apparently for some girl’s birthday. One thing I learned about Australians, they love to wear costumes. Which then leads me to the question what I should dress up as for my birthday next week. Neil stole a plastic sword from one of the women pirates and yelled out “Give me your booty.” I didn’t hear them laughing, but maybe because the music was too loud. We were sitting next to the speakers blaring deafening hip hop music that I started feeling queasy from the bass. We left shortly thereafter.

Afterward, we went to find the fish crate bar called Sector 8. The actual bar itself was made out of aluminum fish crates. It’s another outdoor bar with wooden crates to sit on. I had a lot of layers on so it wasn’t cold being outside. I’d say the temperature was around 60 degrees. Then we went to meet Joe and his brother at Cherry. There was a cover charge at this bar and we weren’t sure if they were still inside. Kevin sent Joe a text and they came out. Most of the bars in Melbourne do not have cover charges, so we didn’t want to go to places that did have one. We walked around the corner of the alley and a bar was just opening. The bouncers were trying to get people to go inside, so we checked it out.

It’s called the Alley Bar and there were only a few people. I think most of them worked there. I sat down on a chair to check out what’s on tap when a guy approached me asking for a favor. He wanted me to check the women’s bathroom to make sure his girlfriend was doing okay. I guess she has been in there a long time. Well, by the time we walked over to the ladies room, his girlfriend was coming out. She was happy that her boyfriend cared so much to check up on her. How long could she have been in the bathroom if they just opened? They had a live band so we stayed. I tried a beer called St. Nanou and it was pretty good.

Joe was getting up early in the morning to catch a flight to Kangaroo island, so he left and the rest of us swaggered on. We found an Irish bar, evident by the huge Irish flag flying outside. They had a live band playing 80’s music upstairs. There was a hunched back old man dancing the night away right in front of the band and was later invited onto the stage to play the tambourine. I think that made his night.

There was a grumpy old man sitting by the bar who grumbled under his breath about my shirt. I was wearing my Amsterdam shirt with a cat on it. How dare he not like it! I held my anger and walked away. The boys had a beer and we left. We walked around looking for another place to go but a lot of them were closing. We ended up at another place called Irish Times that was playing house music, to Neil’s liking. I didn’t want to drink any more by this time so I drank water. We stayed out until 2am and headed home. I think I’ve been to more bars since I’ve been to Melbourne than I have in my lifetime.