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.

Leaving the Nest

Tonight is going to be my first night out, leaving the safety of the hostel.

Crossing the road in Melbourne is a very different to London. A typical road here is two/three lanes wide each way and will quite often have a couple of tram lines in the middle. The trams move a lot slower than the cars giving the whole road crossing experience much more of a frogger feel. Nothing tricky here, you say ... but the main difference between here and London is due to the less traffic and extra lanes the car are moving pretty fast. Almost as fast as cars are supposed to go instead of just basically being parked on the road. I was not looking forward to negotiating my way across a motorway multiple times while drunk.

I was finding it very hard to navigate the streets of Melbourne due to the extremely logical layout using the grind system. I yearned for the twisted windy road layout of London, I got lost there all the time as well but at least it felt familiar.

Going out on your own is really fun, I can heartily recommend it, Looking back I wish I did it more in England now. Being free of the responsibility of looking after people and ensuring they have a good time. Means you can be a lot more experimental and just see where the night takes you. Be ready to run because not all the places it can take you are good.

I've been working on two main techniques for talking to people:

The Mouse Trap

This works best early in the night, find an area where you know a group of people are going to want to sit, e.g two sofas by a table. Park yourself there and hang out, I find having a book/magazine to read helps the hanging a lot. If you can find something with an interesting cover it helps as people will come and talk to you about it. There is a danger that a group of guys will set off the mouse trap, in this case you either need to move the trap to a new location or clean the trap by scaring them off. This hasn't happened to me yet but I'm sure it will. One of the nicest things about the mouse trap is that people are moving into your territory making you in charge of the situation. Its a kind of un-conscious, ancient way but if you recognise it you can use it.

In a variation on the mouse trap, you can hang out at the bar and engaged people as they come to buy drinks.

The Cuckoo

This works better in a crowded bar later in the evening, its kind of the opposite to the mouse trap. You find a group of people move near them and start talking, first impressions really count here, you have a very limited window to ingratiate yourself into their collective. You are invading their space, its a high risk maneuver and rapid/brutal rejection are a distinct possibility. Entertaining a group is fun but very rarely seems to get you hooked up with anyone, you pretty quickly need to focus on one/two people once the group as a whole has accepted you. One thing I have found that seems to make entry easier is to smile a lot. People will react to you smiling and smile themselves more times than not. This is your best time to strike the moment one of the group has smiled at you head in! People seem to understand this and it makes the conversation a little easier, like you've been invited and already done the hello part.

The night was an interesting one, I ended up hanging out with a couple of lesbian and three gay guys. As I was walking past one of the girls was talking about her phobia of spiders, probably the best in I could have possibly had. She was a very good hypnotic subject and less than 10 minutes (my personal best) the phobia was gone. I think being a mysterious foreign person acts as an amplifier with the NLP thing. The conversation was interesting with me even giving the women tips on how to pick up women at one point.

Before the end of the night I had a marriage proposal from Em (one of the lesbians) so that I could stay in the country and so that she could pretend to be striaght to her parents to make them happier. I got here number but said I would have to think about the marriage thing as even a pretend one was a pretty big commitment. One that I was not willing to make the same night I had met someone (it really didn't work out last time I tried).