Picture this: it's Thursday night. One of my sadistic coworkers and I decide to embark on a backpacker pub crawl. Neither of us have been backpacking, so the night is sort of a way to make the youthful memories we missed out on. It is irrelevant that the drinks are going on the company tab.Izzy and I share the same name, and the same desire to die prematurely, so it feels right to do this crawl together. I'm the one in the photos. She's the one taking them. Also her name is "Izzy" and mine is "Issy," so we are easy to tell apart in writing.
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I'm sure you have already gleaned that this is a terrible idea. So have we. No real backpacker bar crawl will take us because we aren't staying at a hostel, so we've just mapped out our own bootleg version around Melbourne.
Blue Moon
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But we didn't come to mingle. We want the kind of full on debauchery that only a person with no discernible support system, two t-shirts, one digital camera, and no travel insurance can create. We need to find some real backpackers.
I Can't Remember the Name of This One, Let's Just Call it Bar Two
We, personally, do not want to loiter in the rain so we head back inside. The bar is playing a cage fight on all its screens. Given there are more TVs than people, we decide to leave.
UBAR
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We approach the American bartender, who's living in the hostel upstairs. He tells us it's his first day. Not just at this bar, but at any bar. This makes immediate sense once we watch him try to wrap his mind around the concept of a drink containing more than two ingredients. As the Devil's Demon materialises before us, it becomes clear that — despite the dark names — we have essentially ordered two glasses of candy. He pours one shot of vodka into a pint glass, then fills the entire thing up with cordial and lemonade. More cordial than lemonade. Think about that: it's the consistency of spit. For those of you playing at home, The Satan's Special is the exact same thing, but also with blue cordial so it goes purple-ish black.Please, if you will, pause here with me for one moment. A person, assumedly a bartender, made these recipes up. Someone who tends bars for a living combined these ingredients, tasted them, and, after swilling them about their taste buds, decided to write the recipe down and force it on the unsuspecting world. All the while, presumably, being paid. This malevolent creator also decided to suggest it would be sold in a mason jar so people would, you know, actually buy the goddamn drink, but really just throw it a pint glass. The final product being, literally, half a litre of pure sugar water.
Drinks in hand, we sit down and a chick behind the bar picks up a microphone and announces some entertainment. Cool, finally. A young guy sits himself on a barstool in front of the bar, facing the crowd of twelve, and begins to fingerpick an acoustic guitar. He sings covers of the Black Keys, and what we can only assume are some originals.
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We realise we are watching an indoor busker and drinking flavoured lube. It's time to leave.
The George
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We go to the bar, which also has Mother on tap, and order some drinks that are named after the suburb we are in, St Kilda. Thy come in mason jars—finally, some integrity around here —although they're soft, plastic mason jars. They will do.These drinks are the exact colour of Berocca-stained piss. We each skull four of these tupperware-container cocktails, hoping to get drunk enough to attract some attention. By this point we've resorted to Googling things like "where are the backpackers?" and "worst club in St Kilda." It is, in a word, grim.
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The drinks do not stir up the drama we'd hoped for. They just make us need to pee. I go to the bathroom and think about throwing up because my dinner was two litres of red cordial, Irish creme, and a horrible acoustic set by the world's worst Jack Johnson impersonator, but it doesn't happen. Fun fact: My pee is neon.When I return to the bar Izzy is at a table with three backpackers. She gives me a look which I think says "goodnight" or something, because her eyelids are covering 80 percent of her eyeballs. She is sitting with another backpacker whose is asking us for dating advice, because she has a crush on this other backpacker who's standing one metre away. Izzy says, "You should just be able to tell if he's into you." But it doesn't seem like she can, so we go and stand with them for a bit. Turns out he's not
Finally, we're interacting with backpackers. Coincidentally, we're also completely fucked. This is the closest we've come all night to what is, I assume, the "backpacker experience"— standing around a table with strangers from different countries, united by blood alcohol content.
The dance floor is literally completely empty, but I go dance anyway. It looks depressing, but it feels pretty good.Then the bar closes. But it's exactly the same "closed" as it is "open." Lights on, nobody moving.
On the way out I jump on a beanbag for "lols" and realise why people who are backpacking seem exponentially less cool than regular people: they've got no idea where hang out, so they wind up in whatever bar is downstairs from their hostel drinking melted gummy bears by the pint. They've probably all got horrible migraines, but since they worked as a dishy for a year to finance this trip, they've got to make it interesting by doing literally anything to spice up their night. Even like, just being on a beanbag.It really all makes sense now.Follow Izzy on Twitter, or follow Issy on Twitter.