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Sep. 14th, 2000 10:24 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
garoteIt's not that I hate bars. It's the strangers I don't get along with. I start overhearing them and seeing them and get this sharp urge to escape. Maybe I'll learn later.
But when I go to a bar I generally have a good time, 'cause I'm with my friends.
Carolyn and I were talking about this recently. She was comparing herself to all her friends who had gone on journeys. Kris has driven cross-country, Tom has gone to Hawaii, Rachel went to France, Kate went to Scotland. She said she felt like they were all sophisticated now, because they had seen people in other places, and generally had a good time with them, and made friends. And slept around.
I said that if she varied her tactics, she could find a huge spectrum of people, just within a five-mile radius of her house. Her friends hadn't neccessarily done better because of radically different people. Perhaps they also took on a different attitude when they traveled, so they connected with new people easier. I asked if she thought she could meet new people in a bar down the street. She said hell no, she wouldn't be able to stand it there.
"But if you went to Germany or Scotland, one of the first places you'd go would be down to the local pub, right? Because it'd be so much more romantic."
Carolyn gave me a "look". I forged on:
"It's really just a place people go to drink and talk, just like here, down the street. Your friends Rachel and Kate both went straight for the pubs when they arrived, in France and Scotland. Rachel met some guy who could barely speak her language, and she ended up in bed with him that night. Why? Because it's all romantic and shit. I really doubt she got a lot more sophisticated than you for doing that."
Carolyn looked briefly scandalized, then laughed. "Yeah - sophisticated. IN BED."
I wonder if the German tourists who come here ever step into a bar. I wonder what they think of the beer.
Most of the time I catch well-to-do tourists walking around the galleries at UCSC, or on the wharf. I'll bet they make better tourists than Americans. They don't say "Let's fly to America so we can hang out in a pub, and go to a ... how you say it ... drive in movie!" Or perhaps it's a matter of them having less social pressure to escape from, and less need to make friends abroad... Hmm.
I used to have the hots for a Hungarian girl, until I thought about it one day and stripped off the accent, and realized that my impression of her being exotic and mysterious was actually just a different label on a regular person who was being distant and had trouble empathizing with me. Great girl, mind you -- but not exactly a match for an over-analytical guy like myself.
I wonder how modern tourists would feel, if they were shoved 300 years back in the past, and had to listen to people pine and say "It must be so exotic and friendly, down there in Bickerton, a whole one hundred miles away... Maybe next year I'll make the journey, if the corn comes in alright..."
Likewise, I hope to live to see the day when people are pining about the exotic new colonies on Mars. (And then they'll get there and spend two years looking out the grubby windows of a half-buried bomb shelter with cement walls and the permanent smell of armpits, and going, "I wish I was at the beach...")
On another tangent, I wonder how modern patriots would feel if they knew that a great many people emigrated here to avoid involuntary conscription in their old country. We're a nation built by draft dodgers!
Okay, I've run out of topics.
But when I go to a bar I generally have a good time, 'cause I'm with my friends.
Carolyn and I were talking about this recently. She was comparing herself to all her friends who had gone on journeys. Kris has driven cross-country, Tom has gone to Hawaii, Rachel went to France, Kate went to Scotland. She said she felt like they were all sophisticated now, because they had seen people in other places, and generally had a good time with them, and made friends. And slept around.
I said that if she varied her tactics, she could find a huge spectrum of people, just within a five-mile radius of her house. Her friends hadn't neccessarily done better because of radically different people. Perhaps they also took on a different attitude when they traveled, so they connected with new people easier. I asked if she thought she could meet new people in a bar down the street. She said hell no, she wouldn't be able to stand it there.
"But if you went to Germany or Scotland, one of the first places you'd go would be down to the local pub, right? Because it'd be so much more romantic."
Carolyn gave me a "look". I forged on:
"It's really just a place people go to drink and talk, just like here, down the street. Your friends Rachel and Kate both went straight for the pubs when they arrived, in France and Scotland. Rachel met some guy who could barely speak her language, and she ended up in bed with him that night. Why? Because it's all romantic and shit. I really doubt she got a lot more sophisticated than you for doing that."
Carolyn looked briefly scandalized, then laughed. "Yeah - sophisticated. IN BED."
I wonder if the German tourists who come here ever step into a bar. I wonder what they think of the beer.
Most of the time I catch well-to-do tourists walking around the galleries at UCSC, or on the wharf. I'll bet they make better tourists than Americans. They don't say "Let's fly to America so we can hang out in a pub, and go to a ... how you say it ... drive in movie!" Or perhaps it's a matter of them having less social pressure to escape from, and less need to make friends abroad... Hmm.
I used to have the hots for a Hungarian girl, until I thought about it one day and stripped off the accent, and realized that my impression of her being exotic and mysterious was actually just a different label on a regular person who was being distant and had trouble empathizing with me. Great girl, mind you -- but not exactly a match for an over-analytical guy like myself.
I wonder how modern tourists would feel, if they were shoved 300 years back in the past, and had to listen to people pine and say "It must be so exotic and friendly, down there in Bickerton, a whole one hundred miles away... Maybe next year I'll make the journey, if the corn comes in alright..."
Likewise, I hope to live to see the day when people are pining about the exotic new colonies on Mars. (And then they'll get there and spend two years looking out the grubby windows of a half-buried bomb shelter with cement walls and the permanent smell of armpits, and going, "I wish I was at the beach...")
On another tangent, I wonder how modern patriots would feel if they knew that a great many people emigrated here to avoid involuntary conscription in their old country. We're a nation built by draft dodgers!
Okay, I've run out of topics.
