Umamiblog

I’m never drinking again, ever. And this time I mean it.As you can probably tell, today’s exciting installment comes at a slightly later time than usual. My cellphone tells me it is a quarter past 7pm here, I’ve only been up for a couple of hours. That’s how good the night was…

The night started well, we woke Richie up at about 4:30pm and went for another swim, this time pissing a great number of surfers off by dropping in on their waves with the hostel’s body boards. Great fun. I had a wee battle with the ‘Backpacker Express’. This is the name the locals give the infamous rip on Bondi Beach, it took me about 10 mins to get in once it had started to suck me out.

After that we got ready and headed down to the bar in the hostel. Dragging Richie to the beach meant the bar opened up an hour and a half behind schedule. It was the busiest I had seen the bar, I’m sure it was because of Richie’s 21st and not because of the $2 beer

Things went really well, I met even more of Richie’s friends and had a good run on the pool table. With the help of a Welshman, we managed to beat a couple of Dutch backpackers successively.

As I mentioned in my previous post, Richie managed to get his wee hands on some guest passes to Home, a nightclub in Darling Harbour. While Richie had 30 of them, even more than that wanted to go. Even I was asked by a couple of people if I had any tickets.

One young lady with a thick European accent (I couldn’t spot where it came from initially) asked me if I had any tickets. I must have seem like a right drongo because I looked up to see if I could point out Richie to her. I didn’t see him so I was blank for a few seconds before I said she needed to ask someone else.

She then asked me “Have you ever kissed a Dutchy?”. I assumed with her accent that I had misheard her. She then repeated herself; “Have you ever kissed a Dutchy?”. Then I clicked and pulled up my left hand simultaneously pointing at the ring on my finger and sayin “I’m married”. This was quite amusing to me but this poor girl was mortified and couldn’t back off fast enough. Funnily enough, no one asked me for tickets after that.

Yuk, someone is smoking some ‘electric puha’ nearby.

Anyway, the night progressed, we managed to convince Richie to close the bar early and head into town. The Vietnamese taxi driver was great fun, letting us choose and turn up the music while he asked a load of questions about NZ.

We got to Darling Harbour sometime between midnight and 1am and what a great sight it was. The harbour, the buildings, the lights, the monorail, the people, the atmosphere, it was ll excellent. We found our way to the entrance to the night club, Home.

There was four of us in the taxi, Richie, myself, and two Pommies. Richie was the only one the bouncer would let through. He sent the two pommies away because they were too casual and then told me to come back in 20 minutes when I sobered up(?!). Coming from sleepy old (in comparison) Dunedin it was quite a shock of sorts being turned away from a club.

So I was counting down my minutes, I have no idea what gave the bounce the impression I was too drunk. I just think he didn’t like the look of me… 11 minutes had gone (yes, I was actually counting the individual minutes) and the bouncers changed guard. So we tried once more (Richie had already gone through), the pommies got turned away once more but I made it to the next step with some random stranger.

“Where have you come from?” he askes us. I say “Bondi!” and the other guy stares off into space. The other guy was shown the door, while I made it to the next stage; the metal detector. Having never been scanned before, before going into a club it was another surprise. Everything in my pockets set it off. My cellphone, my key, some change, etc.

Once I made it past that stage, then it was the stamp. They stamped something onto my arm, instead of just a plain old ink stamp, it was something that would only glow under fluorescent light, cool!

I finally make it into the club and WOW, it was huge. Richie quickly found me and showed me through it all. There were several floors, several DJs, several bars, and Richie was annoyed because he couldn’t show me a particular level that was closed…

It was great fun, the music was fantastic and although there were hundreds upon hundreds of people in there, you could still move around with relative ease. The drinks were very expensive but it didn’t stop anyone ordering them. The view across Darling Harbour from the club was fantastic.

After dancing and drinking with Richie and his mates for several hours (I must have burnt several hundred calories) I had had enough. Everyone else was still going strong so I made a quiet retreat and found a taxi and headed home. I remember going through some tunnel which was kind of interesting, it must have been under the city itself.

I had to get the taxi driver to pull over for me so I could have a wee spit on the side of the road. The guy, an elderly Asian man, got out and got me a drink of water and something to wipe my mouth with out of his boot, bless him.

I finally make it back to the backpackers and pulled out my key card to see that I had managed to split it in half somehow! I was still feeling pretty bad, now about 5am, so I decided I wouldn’t go into my room just yet incase I needed to get up again and woke up all my roommates in the process.

So I lie down outside the door, about an hour and a half later, Mark, one of my roommates comes home. Laughs at me on the floor in the fetal position, picks me up and throws me in bed. I remember trying to go to the bathroom before that and some guy wouldn’t let me in. I thought at the time that he must be doing something dodgy so I just left him to it. I find out the next day from Mark that I was trying to get into someone elses room and not the bathroom, whoops

Anyway, most of us in our room had been out all night so we were looking very sorry the next day. We all finally woke and got up at 5pm. We’d managed to sleep the day away completely!!! And amazingly, some of them have already started again for tonight. I know this Kiwi won’t be able to do anything like that tonight…

The weather today is rather crappy, it was raining this morning and has been overcast all day – atleast we didn’t sleep through a sunny day. The temperature is also much much lower but still t-shirt weather. The beach was almost empty however.

Thanks for all your interest guys, I appreciate all the comments. I’m sorry (Mum and Deb) that I didn’t get something up earlier. I really appreciate that you’ve checked a dozen times already today and I’ll try to be a bit more timely next time

Bye for now, I’m off to Melbourne tomorrow morning so I’m really looking forward to that.