Jan 15 - Going Out At Night Is Weird
By Stefano Blanca Sciacaluga
The older I get the weirder it is to go out at night. Don’t get me wrong, I love going out at night, always have, and especially on the weekend when I don’t have to constantly be thinking “will I have a huge headache in the office from these four beers?” (yes, it doesn’t take much these days). But I’ve noticed that the older I get the weirder going out at night is, and not because I’m having strange nights out, but everyone is just stranger.
I started going out regularly when I was fifteen, almost sixteen, and there was something to do every Friday and every Saturday. Everybody went everywhere, as in to all sorts of places, and although the idea of being a regular at a place was normal, as it has always been and continues to be, bar hopping was a thing and nights out had the potential to be anything from a familiar experience to a magical boozy adventure through time and space.
Nowadays, at 28 and with my own flat to do nothing in but play 8 Ball Pool on my iPad and watch KUWTK* reruns I see myself spending less time out and more time having people over for beers. But it’s not necessarily because I don’t want to go out, but because going out has become some sort of weird freak-show experience. When I was sixteen, seventeen, eighteen, FOMO was real, and you had important choices to make because there were options on things to do on a night out. Today I find it had to find something to do, not because there are plenty of options but because there are none at all, you simply cannot go out and go with the flow, we’ve become accustomed to making events of Friday nights, we’ve become ritualistic, and everything needs to be planned out, booked and well thought out if you want to go somewhere with ambiente.
Think of the children! What the hell are sixteen year olds doing for fun now that Casemates is no longer a thing, and Liwii Drinks is a Century 21, constantly reminding you that by the time you’re 21 you’ll have to get into a century-long mortgage to afford any of their properties. When I was sixteen we would play a concert, or go to a friend’s concert and still have time to hit up a packed Lord Nelson. Nowadays Casemates on a Friday night is just a tiny bit better than Casemates on a Tuesday night. And what about Wild Wednesdays and student nights, are those still a thing?
I speak to friends and colleagues and nobody is excited about the prospect of going out on a Friday anymore, let alone a Saturday. We’ve done it to ourselves, we’ve restricted ourselves to a weird weekend ritual of Chatham Counterguard - Bruno’s - Dusk - Pizzeria Plaza, and with this found our way into a handful of types of people:
The Ya es Viernes
This person, usually a male way past his twenties, possibly halfway through his thirties or more, that you find at Jazz Cafe at 3am stumbling around in a suit, and not because he’s dapper AF but because he’s an accountant and hasn’t been home since 8am, buying people they barely know shots and trying to enchufarse with ANYBODY that’ll be their best mate for the night and who they can buy with drinks at Dusk, and all the while being the most annoying person on earth, especially to the musicians.
The recent divorcee
In this group you’ll find the kind of person you’ve heard a lot about, (“hay que ver que dejó al marido y ya está con otro”) not gender-exclusive and usually hanging out with a group of people they just can’t keep up with, because they’re the young ones from the office and are their kids’ age.
These are the kind of people you see in OMG Photophilliac Dusk photos EVERY. WEEKEND. WITHOUT. FAILURE. “Mira este otra vez”. You might see them for just a short while before they end up either with someone new and younger (men with younger women, mostly) or burning out. If they survive they graduate to the “Ya es Viernes” club.
The cuando el wife me deja
Groups of guys in their mid-to-late twenties and early thirties pretending they’re enjoying wine and gin and tonic; ordering the second-cheapest wine at My Wines to not look cheap but secretly wishing they could be drinking pints but it’s not in right now. Don’t get me wrong, the girls are also out, they’ve been planning this for ages, because these are the kinds of people that have a joint Facebook account, that don’t trust they can go out alone, with their friends, without ending up in someone else’s bed (or that’s the fear they’ve got, at least), so they end up keeping an eye on each other all night.
The kind of people that think being in a relationship with someone means their social life is over and going out on a Friday night is something you can only do on an extremely well planned special occasion.
These are the people that have somehow made everybody believe a night out in Gibraltar has to be food somewhere on ‘The Strip’ (Chatham Counterguard), with drinks at Jazz Cafe, moving on to Bruno’s and ending the night at Dusk; the winning formula.
The I done messed up
You'll see these people sometimes, the kind of people that somehow thought going out for a nice quiet meal to Chatham Counterguard on a Friday night was a great idea. The kind of people that could kill you with a look because your group of ten are making a bit of (normal) noise on the table next door.
The kind of people that don’t understand that Gibraltarians are weird creatures that think getting drunk and driving your car past The Strip thirty times in two hours is normal, whether your tyres are burst and your car is making the most hellish of noises or not (I experienced this last Friday).
Of course, these people are usually past their sixties and have come from abroad to tropical Gibraltar for a few days and leave slightly disappointed that Gibraltarians are not as British as they thought they would be.
The invisible bunch
These are the people that say they are going out, the ones you don’t see and those that stay out of the circuit and ritual of Friday night outings. It’s not a bad thing to be a part of, I sometimes go out on Friday nights and don’t necessarily go to the same places everybody does; but these are the kind of people that make me think are hiding some sort of secret, going to cool places few people have heard of, which seems quite silly though because we’d find out. Maybe they’re just going to All’s Well.
*Keeping Up with the Kardashians, who’s your favourite? Mine’s Bruce.
{fcomment}
