Girls Who Like Boys, Who Like Boys To Be Girls.

Hostels bring together temporary friends. Last night, my temporary friends and I went out on this old town.

For the first time internationally, I needed to do my laundry. As I waited for the dryer to do its drying thing, I started talking to two Canadian girls doing their frying thing on the electric stove. They had heard about a 'cool bar' they wanted to 'check out', and so before too long I was accompanying them to the excellently named Nada Bar, whose frontage simply exuded a neon sign 'Bar.' It reminded me startlingly of Melbourne; a converted house with its individual rooms in tact, short multicoloured furniture based on the interiors of the spaceships of 2001: A Space Odyssey, overpriced white beer on tap and a small drinking crowd covered with striped scarves and berets. The DJ at the front hovered between Daft Punk and Blur. My associates had no idea why I might be singing along to Girls And Boys, and though I considered explaining the seminal importance of Parklife to Britain in the early 1990s, I wisely stopped before I had begun.

My companions felt as though they were at a house party to which they were uninvited, so for the second time this trip I ended up accompanying English speakers to an English theme pub, to listen to Eye Of The Tiger while drinking local beer. We were joined by two more Canadians and a New Yorker couple, and after a few words spoken in French (a mostly shared language among the group), we moved on to the 'clubbing' phase of the evening.

This involved going to a bar which had decided it was not open to anybody under the age of 25; drinking shots and cocktails at an American-owned Bullwinkle's bar which was also a restaurant which was also a casino (with a blackjack table run by a fat guy with a tuxedo); and going home.