Dancing

It was a long night, and it was a good night. Sadly, it was also my last night: Kitzbühel après-ski, I'm going to miss you! After our fun and games at Snowbunnys, Jake and Mitch, Nikolas and Viktor and myself hit the usual pub crawl route: we started at Flannigans, and then eventually moved on to Highways. Flanny's was mainly about the drinking (and the passive smoking — f$#% that place stinks), and Highways was mainly about the dancing. All of it was about partying like only an Austrian mountain village knows how. I got back at about 4am — considering that Jake and Mitch were asleep on the breakfast table the next morning, I hate to think when the hell they returned.

I've been to cities that never close down — but I haven't yet found a town (anywhere in the world) without an Irish pub. Congratulations, Ireland: us Aussies only have ourselves everywhere on the planet; you guys have taken world conquest that one step further. Flannigans just goes to show that Kitzbühel (and the Austrian Alps) is no exception. Flannigans is loud, it's smoky, and it's packed every night of the week. This evening — after our enchiladas — Jake and Mitch continued their après-ski tour of the town, by bringing the gang over here. These two Aussie brothers are incredible: they walk into Flannigans, and half the pub is rushing up to talk to them — seems that they're best mates with everyone! Flannigans has a fairly large contingent of "regulars": and if you hang around, you soon get to know most of them. This really is a very gemütliche place, after all.

This was it: today was Adam's barmitzvah! In the morning, we had the service and the torah call-up; and in the afternoon, we had a colossal lunch in the shul hall. All of this was at the conservative synagogue that my cousins go to, just down the road from their house in Newton Center. Adam did a great job on stage: read his portion very confidently, and gave a solid and well-intentioned speech. And needless to say, the lunch was scrumdiddlyumptious.

Last night, we went to a crazy trance disco all night long. Tonight, the insane adventure that is "a weekend in BA" continued. No small fry clubs tonight: no sirree, tonight we hit Pacha, the biggest and the most famous of them all. Pacha is an enormous complex, a fair way north of the city centre (near the airport), that holds thousands of people on its two spacious dance floors every Saturday night, and that also regularly plays host to some of the disco world's biggest names, as weekly guest DJs. It was a big night, and an extremely fun one. Now, this is what Argentina is all about.

Now that G-d has (hopefully) inscribed me in the Book of Life for the New Year, it's time to get back to sinful business as usual, and to hit that awesome BA party scene! Tonight, after finishing up with day two of Rosh Hashanah (and with Erev Shabbat), I returned to The Clan, and went straight up to the bar (as one does, when one is at The Clan). We the Clan crowd chilled in the bar over (more than) a few drinks, for a while; then, at about 2am, a group of 6 of us headed to the huge disco club of La Diosa (lit: "The Goddess"). I'd say we were just in time for it to open and to start seriously pumping. And seriously pump is exactly what this place did.

Tonight was Saturday night. I'm in Bariloche. And I've just finished doing seven days of intense snowboarding. I don't know what you would have done like at a time like this — but for me, the appropriate course of action seemed obvious enough. Party! Thus it was that, after dinner tonight, I went with the Patanuk crew down to Wilkenny's, an Irish pub and club in the middle of town, and one of the most popular places to rev up the night in Bariloche. Packed with overpriced imported beer, with all the usual music (well above full volume), and with many a fellow latin-dance-challenged gringo, it made for one hell of a night. ¡Viva Bariloche!

Do I really need to write this blog post? Considering what it was already like in the afternoon, I think it's pretty obvious what was going down in Baños tonight, and what Patrick and I got up to. Every place in "bar street" was open, and it was open all night long. Local girls. Copious drinking. Vigorous dancing. Pumping music. Get the picture? It was big — biggest night I've had in quite a while. Baños is the place to be, and this was the night to be here.