After the work at the crèche, some of the late nights in the favela and the excitement of the police raid, I was just looking to chill out for a few of days. My first night out in Ipanema was spent at a bar watching the Brazil vs. Argentina World Cup qualifier; another night was spent having quiet night of drinks with fellow hostellers. But, what I hadn’t yet had, three nights in, was a real night out – one real bender. So when Dan and Miriam wanted to get a group together to go clubbing, I jumped at the suggestion.
Me and my Ipanema Crew
I just want to stop the story right here and take some time to explain the irony that was my experience with hostels in Ipanema. Knowing that I was going to want some time to relax after living in Rocinha, I had booked two nights at The Lighthouse – highly recommended by the guidebooks and Hostelworld as a quieter, more laid-back type of hostel. While working at the crèche, I’d talked with Chris, who was going on almost three months in Rio de Janeiro, about my plans after Rocinha. He confirmed the good word about The Lighthouse, but he did say that since it was a small hostel (only one eight-person dorm and one private double-room), if I really wanted to meet a lot of other travellers, I should consider the Che Lagarto hostel in Ipanema (which was a larger hostel with more of a party atmosphere). When I made the decision, during my second week in Rocinha, to extend my stay in Rio for another three nights, I followed Chris’ advice and booked at the Che Lagarto, rather than extending my time at The Lighthouse.
Dan and I checked into The Lighthouse on the same day. Josh arrived the next night. Miriam came in on the morning I checked out of The Lighthouse.
Here’s the irony: Even after I moved into Che Lagarto – which was a fifteen minute hike away from The Lighthouse – Dan, Miriam and Josh remained my crew in Ipanema. Obviously, if I had to do it all over again, I would have just stayed at The Lighthouse and saved on all the walking.
While I did meet a few people at Che Lagarto, most of them were travelling a part of larger groups, which are just harder to break into socially. The few solo travellers I did connect with at my new hostel I did over breakfast, and all of them had plans to leave Rio that afternoon or evening. Bad timing, I guess.
But back to the Tuesday night out:
I suggested the group head out to Leblon, where the guidebooks indicated the better bars and clubs were located. (Selfishly, it was also better for me logistically, since my new hostel was located right on the border of Leblon, while the Lighthouse was on the opposite end of Ipanema.)
Dan and Miriam showed up at the Che Lagarto to fetch me around midnight. (Josh ended up begging out because he had a ridiculously early morning flight out to Lima.) The three of us were ready to party, and we piled into a cab and crossed the canal from Ipanema into Leblon, headed for a club called The House.
That was a big tequila shot.
The Che Lagarto had also organised an outing there so the place was filled with about a 3:1 ratio of gringos to Cariocas. There were two floors, both with a dance-floor and a bar. The music was adequate and loud. It seemed as suitable a place as any to get nice and thoroughly blitzed. In between the dancing, socialising and mixing with other partiers, Dan, Miriam and I plied ourselves, and each other, with copious amounts of beer, tequila shots, gin, and vodka until about 5:15am.
I swear to God we weren't stoned. At least, I wasn't stoned.
Sounds all rather pedestrian, doesn’t it? I mean, this could have been clubbing anywhere else in the world.
Well, what happened next made this night one for the books.
Before I go on, I need to step back and explain how clubs in Brazil work. The bar staff does not handle money. You are given a card at the door, and any expenses you rack up while at the club (cover charge, drinks, snacks, coat-check, etc.) are marked down. When you decide to leave, you bring that checklist – there are hefty fines ranging in the hundreds of reais for losing one’s card – to a cashier and settle up before exiting.
This system usually comes in conjunction with some form of minimum payment or deal. At the DJ Club in São Paulo, the entrance fee was R$15 for men, and R$10 for women, but that was waived if one drank double that money’s worth at the bar. The House’s minimum payment was R$40: R$10 as a cover-charge, with the other R$30 going towards drinks – you could go in and not drink a thing, but you were still going to pay at least forty reais.
We’d been drinking for a good five hours. I don’t think any of us were remotely worried that our bar bills would be under R$30. However, disagreeing with the management over just how much we’d exceeded the initial thirty reais threshold was when all the fun started.
I was the first out. I was charged R$10 more than I thought I would be. I’d been checking the prices at the bar when ordering, but I guess I was served the more expensive vodka for my last drink. I tried arguing, but, after a minute or two, I gave up the discrepancy as a lost cause. Dan gave the cashier R$100 to settle a ninety reais tab – a cashier who then insisted that he had only given enough to cover his bill. Getting nowhere with the cashier with regards to his R$10 change, he turned his attention towards the bouncer at the door, who listened to him just long enough to guide him outside.
We were not the only people having problems getting out of the club. Everybody was getting short-changed, or finding the drinks more expensive than advertised. One poor idiot just drank more alcohol than he had cash to pay, and the manager was threatening to call the police on him. Dan and I, now standing just outside the doorway waiting for Miriam, both agreed that we were cheesed off less about the money, and more on the principle of it all. Considering all of this, I felt lucky that my contribution to the rip-off scheme was only the equivalent of six Canadian dollars.
I felt lucky, that is, until we realised that Miriam was still inside getting figuratively screwed.
Marked on her card were a significant number of drinks – at least three beers, a measure of vodka and a Red Bull – she didn’t order. These extra drinks totalled up to a R$50 overcharge.
And she was having none of it.
She argued with cashier. When that didn’t work, she sought out the manager of the club and argued her case with him. Of course, neither the cashiers nor the manager of the club spoke a lick of English, so the club’s English / Portuguese translator had to act as a linguistic go-between. The back-and-forth went on for a good half-hour – the translator kept getting distracted with other disputes. Miriam insisted that the bar staff had messed up the markings; the manager firmly explained that since the club had been significantly bilked in the past by patrons who had complained that the cards were wrong, that there was nothing he could do.
During all of this, Dan and I had worked our way back into the club to give Miriam some moral support. However, in the end, the manager refused to budge and we had to pool our resources to provide the full amount. Miriam turned over the money, leaving all of two reais left between the three of us.
We weren’t quite finished at the club yet. If Miriam was going to pay R$50 for alcohol she didn’t drink, she was damn well going to get her extra money’s worth by telling the manager exactly what she thought of the lousy system, of the club’s policy for dealing with disputes, and of the manager himself.
It was awesome.
Especially with the poor translator, who, to his credit, translated Miriam’s harangue pretty much word-for-word to the manager.
This is just a small example:
“And I’d like to say that your management style is atrocious. Your treatment of me was shit. Your treatment of your staff is shit.” (There was one stage during the night that he started screaming at the translator.) “You, sir, are a complete dickwad.”
There was a string of rapid-fire Portuguese, a couple of ‘ums’, then a long pause.
The translator sheepishly turned back towards Miriam, “Sorry, I’m just trying to come up with the correct Portuguese for ‘dickwad’.”
Miriam also tried to recoup her fifty reais by stealing the translator's hat.
After getting Miriam’s fifty reais’ worth in, the three of us were out on the street, the last patrons to leave the club. It was six in the morning, and day was dawning. I had my bank card on me and the bank ATMs down the street had just opened for withdrawals. Even though we now had money for a cab, we decided to walk the three kilometres back along the beach fronting Leblon and Ipanema.
It was a beautiful morning. The sky was afire, with the rising sun only partially obscured by the few clouds floating above the rocks at Arpoador. The sidewalk and bike paths were already filling up with health-conscious Cariocas out for morning jogs and bike rides – Cariocas who were carefully navigating around the group of three still-somewhat-drunk gringos, who were slowly weaving their ways eastward.
We needed to sober up. We were tired, but not so much concerned with getting home as with finding some post-night-out food. In our native countries, this would have been an easy proposition: Dan and Miriam, Brits that they are, would have gone straight for a place selling donner kebabs; I would have sought out a diner breakfast, or early-morning Chinese food in Toronto. We would find none of these things in Rio. But we did know that there was a McDonalds near The Lighthouse.
We got to McDonalds at 7:00am, ready to stuff our faces with disgusting, greasy, fast food. It was closed. This was typical. Back home, the diligent staff would be at their posts by 6:00am, ready to satisfy the culinary whims of drunkards and fatties everywhere. But in laid back, lackadaisical and lazy Rio, the McMuffins and hash browns wouldn’t flow until 8:00am.
We couldn’t wait that long.
Fortunately, we came up with a backup plan. The Lighthouse has a guest kitchen, and a 24-hour supermarket one block away. We were just going to have to do our own fry-up. Some of the cash I’d procured before leaving Leblon turned itself into bacon, eggs, bread, and orange juice. That fry-up turned out to be better than anything we might have gotten at Mickey Ds.
Don't get drunk Rio if you don't want to end up posing for pictures like this one. Why did we do this? Damned if I know.
The night finally ended, for me, when I crawled into my bunk at the Che Lagarto at 10:30am.
My only regret of that evening is that, while trying so hard to stifle my laughter, I missed what the Portuguese for ‘dickwad’ is.
Related Entries:
1. Working at the Crèche
2. Waking Up By Machine Gun
3. Rio de Janeiro
0 comments
Post a Comment