Sunday, November 29, 2009

close encounters of the 3rd kind

Let me start this post with a little prologue. A couple of months ago, me and my college friends decided to go for an afternoon movie. Once the movie was done, we started the usual hunt for a decent pub where we can spend some time. We found this place called "soda", which is right next to poptates. It was early in the evening so the place was empty. The food was good, the beer was cheap, their selection of music was good, infact, it was too good to be true. Something was definitly amiss here. That's when we took a look at their menu. they had a so called "Aphoridite menu" with names so explicit that i'll let the picture do the talking.It took sometime, but after a while we thought that this was just a marketing gimmick so we didn't bother much. We were pleasantly surprised when they said there's a discount of 40% during the early evening hours, so we ordered a couple of pitchers more and had a good time there, enjoying the 80's music that the DJ was playing. With all the beer, we didn't notice that the place was filling up with guys. The guy at the counter also told us about this membership scheme where we could always avail this discount, we agreed on hearing the word discount. The 2nd clue that this was no ordinary pub came from the membership card.

After reading the "man's club" part, we assumed it to mean something like a real man's club where they serve good drinks and where people can enjoy their drunken arguments. We were in high spirits and we were enjoying the music so we didn't pay much heed to this clue either.

After registering for their membership card, we got a lot of sms alerts from them about special offers, some weird ones which offered a discount for wearing a white shirt, that too during monsoon. We joked around saying it could be a wet tshirt competition.

Now lets fast forward to 4 months later. Today we decided to give that place another shot, hoping it would be normal. Today seemed to be some karaoke night, with a guy singing along to some songs of the 80's. There was something weird about that guy too, for starters he was surrounded by women, not the kind of women you would see hanging around a straight guy. The door man also seemed to be well groomed and polite, something that you would not find in your average guy.

We were a little late so the place was full, we were asked to wait near the bar stools at the DJ console. we ordered a pitcher there, but we got a table before it came. Once we were seated, we asked the waiter to get our beer to the table instead, and here is the conversation that followed.

Us: we ordered a pitcher near the DJ console, can you get it here?
Waiter: (with a weird grin on his face) you ordered the DJ?
Us: what? no no.. we ordered a beer

Once again we tried to justify it by trying to pass it off as the waiters weird sense of humor. The next clue that this was a weird place was when the karaoke guy started singing "believe" by cher and his group of girls started cheering for him. We also noticed that the walls were covered in graffiti. On a closer inspection we found that the graffiti also contained phone numbers of guys looking for other guys. We then looked around and found the room full of guys, there was not a single girl in sight. The karaoke guy was now singing "you can run you can hide but you can't escape my love" by Enrique. We were getting uncomfortable now, even the beer had a pink tinge to it. We had to get out of that place as soon as we could. the 3 of us gulped down that pitcher of beer within 5 minutes and called for the bill. Getting the bill took another 10 minutes which we spent restlessly looking around and analyzing the choice of music by the DJ, who was now paying Robbie williams rock dj, also a gay song. We paid the bill quickly, grabbed our belongings and tried to get the hell out of there.

I tried opening the door, but it wasn't opening, my friend then said "push it harder" i turned back and said to him "that's not something you should say at a place like this" he retorted with a "fuck you" i turned back again and said, "that's something you should definitely not say at a place like this" luckily the door opened and we were out. we then shifted our base to poptates which was next to it. Higher prices be dammed, at least poptates isn't gay, and it had people of the fairer sex too.