Watch out for Charlie!

Random fact: English people are forbidden from donating blood in Australia, this is an outrage! link.

So after all the fun I had on challenge day I was really up for a good night out. When drinking in Melbourne expect to pay 3-4 pounds a pint (there's no bloody pound sign on a us keyboard which they use here) . This can go up to as much as 4-5 pounds a bottle in the classy places.

Also there is a kind of weird beer league reversal with a lot of the cheap beers in England ending up as the expensive ones over here. In several nights out I have only found one pub that sells 4x, and none that sell Fosters. I've not been able to find any bitter either, but apparently there are a few British pubs around that sell it.

I had spotted a bar near the station that looked promising on my various walks across the city during the day. Bar E Fifty Five was a friendly place with a strict no chairs policy, only sofas where allowed in here making it a very comfortable place indeed. While here I meet Tom, Tom was upset he had just come out of a 8 year relationship and his first date since had just stood him up.

I took Tom under my wing, well figuratively speaking he was about a foot taller than me.
After a couple of beers and a you can't base your self esteem on women because there crazy talk he was back in the game. In fact a little to back in the game for my tastes, he was embarrassing me! As we walked to the next pub he called out to groups of women in the street saying,

'Hello Ladies!'

As I cringed, I made a mental note that next chance we get I will give him a little bit of an anti-pep talk when we arrived at the next bar. At first me and Tom made a very good team charming people with friendly banter, till the beer started to kick in. At some point one of us decided it would be fun to try and pretend we were brothers (I'm pretty sure it wasn't me). This lead to a few amusing conversations trying to justify this outrageous claim to the natives who frequent the various bars around Melbourne.

Then the beer really started to show, the nice brother talk moved to the comedy low of pretending we where in Nam together (probably my idea). You think that me telling people about how Tom had saved the whole platoon by jumping on a grenade would have been enough but ... as more beer was consumed we ended up just going up to people and telling them to

'Watch out for Charlie!'

We found this historical I didn't have enough sensory acuity left to tell if other people felt the same. I do however remember at one point saying

'hes in the trees'

As a way of explaining what we had just said to some very confused people, to my drunken mind that was obviously the information they needed to complete the puzzle. One of the bars tried to charge us $10 each to get in, but luckily someone had opened a side door to get some air so we walked in there instead.

Tom ran out of the pub!
I ran after Tom! - wow this is sounding like one of those books they made you read at primary school. He had pulled a relatively nice girl, sorry I mean Tom pulled Jane. I tired to explain to him that it was 02:00 in the morning and she was nice, and easily the best he was going to get tonight. There was no reasoning with him. Tom ran from Jane. The beer had turned him into a man possessed, he needed a strip club. Sensing that I would be holding him back we parted ways and I returned to my hostel to sleep. We didn't get each other contact details both of us understood that this was a one off.

My blogs going to be a little quiet for the next couple of days as I have a lot of reading to do to prepare for my new job.