In Da Club: A Night on the Town

For Milica's 22nd birthday we decided to go out and explore an interesting bar. Beforehand we had dinner together (tapas potluck) and I met Milana and Alexandria for the first time. I made an excellent impression: Milana, who has lived in Germany, very kindly (a little too tolerantly, if you ask me) explained that scheissenhausen does not mean bathroom and is in fact a word that I invented. It apparently sounds very close to something else that is offensive in German.

 

Readers, allow me to defend myself:

When I was 16, I participated in a trip to Italy with my high school friends. We had a layover in Germany and our airline was called Lufthansa. My friends thought it would be entertaining to rename ourselves with German last names. Mine was Luftenhausen. We thought that hausen surely meant house (apparently haus means house). And scheissen, we had right (in French, it translates to merde). These assumptions combined with my understanding of the German language (courtesy of Georgia Nicolson) led me to believe that I had just deduced the word for bathroom! What a useful thing to know when you are in Germany! Apparently, I would have been given strange looks if I had ever tried to use it. Sincere thanks to Milana for ensuring that I will never have an opportunity to do so.

We didn't leave for the bar until after midnight (very French of us) so we had to walk. It was a beautiful night and we got to walk along the Rhône, lit up by the Hôtel Dieu. The bar Milica chose was called Ayer's Rock and is a moored boat on the river.



The bar was in a moored boat on the Rhône River

Ayer's Rock - The Authentic Australian Bar 





Once inside, we started dancing. For some reason, every experience of a DJ I have had while I have been here has included the songs In Da Club, Let's Get it Started and D.A.N.C.E. by Justice. I totally appreciate it. We threw down to The Real Slim Shady and Guess Who's Back, Jump, Shout, and a bunch of other familiar songs. There was the standard house music and some stuff that's been pretty popular in the mainstream lately. The biggest differences with the bars in France (and pretty much everywhere other than North America) is that men dance. Really dance. They dance well. And they ask to dance with you. I don't think I need to tell you that I am thrilled.

Hattie and I started creating a line-dance for the house music that got too repetitive. I think it could be the next Thriller or, you know, Soulja Boy. I'm not picky. It was great fun because everyone started pulling out their favourite go-to classic cheesy moves: the lawn mower, the shopping cart, the cheese grater, the chop, the Q-tip, the sprinkler, the dribble & the slam dunk, the front stroke & the snorkle. We may have made some of those up, but we were probably some of the most interesting dancers there. We even made friends with some French people who could apparently sense that we were English and told us one of the girls they were with that night was from Manchester on holidays. They may have just outdone us in the dancing department.

We stayed until 4am (also very French of us). There was still a huge line-up to get in. We could have rounded the night out with a bike ride on the Velo'v co-op bicycles to get home and we would have had an extremely French night, but we opted to walk instead.