This Doesn't Happen At Home

Cape Town Cafe: No, not that Cape Town.
And no, not even really a cafe.
Photo courtesy of TripAdvisor

So here's the scene: I'm at a place called Cape Town Cafe. It's an outdoor bar with a bumpin' nightclub on the inside and almost exclusively patronized by expats. It also happens to be one of the few places where a handful of people are still out at midnight on a Wednesday night. Which is where I've been for the last hour. Sitting with the beautiful, Swedish 20-something I met earlier today and talking about our world travels.

I'm definitely not in America anymore.

Nothing too crazy happened today until the evening time. I hung out on my own most of the day. Around 7pm as I was heading back up to my room, I saw a guy on his laptop in courtyard. He seemed normal enough so I invited him to play a game of pool with me. I found out that SE is from Germany and has been traveling for a while. He does something technical sales-y that I didn't really understand but that I'm sure is very important and that let's him travel a lot. He also claims to have mastered the Indian head nod (also referred to as the Indian head bob, bobble, wobble, or shake). For those of you unfamiliar with the Indian head nod, it's a sort of side-to-side movement of the head that sometimes means yes, sometimes means no, sometimes means "I don't want to say no," sometimes is a sign of acknowledgement, and sometimes means something else entirely. It's sort of like the Swiss Army knife of gestures, you can use it in any number of situations depending on your needs at the time. Unfortunately for SE, he doesn't actually have it as mastered as he thinks he does. Sorry, buddy.

He had met another couple girls also staying in our hostel and invited me to go out with them later. We played a few games of pool and then the girls came out to hang out in the courtyard. They're both really friendly and the four of us played a card (and beverage-enhanced) game of Ring of Fire. I know the game as Kings, except some of the rules were a little different, which definitely threw me off (though to be fair, playing with water gives me a huge advantage). MT is the first girl I've ever met from Wales.

via Wikipedia

Side note: In this edition of Know Your Planet, we cover Wales. In case you were wondering, yes, Wales is in fact it's own country and not part of England. Though it is part of the United Kingdom. Which is not, I repeat not synonymous with England because England is part of and not the entirety of the UK. Sort of like how a square is a rectangle 100% of the time but a rectangle is not necessarily a square. Sort of. Not exactly.

My understanding of Welsh girls (N=1) is that every other sentence they say sounds like it should end in "and then we had tea and crumpets." The other girl is SR who is from Sweden. Is this the first girl I've met from Sweden on my travels? Maybe. I tend to mix up my Nordic countries.

Where all the cool Swedes go to live it up on a Saturday night

A few hours later around 10:45pm we head out toward what is apparently the only cool place that's open at this time of night at this time of year, Cape Town Cafe. It's fairly close to our hostel so it wasn't a big deal to get there. It was a cool scene, even if somewhat lacking of... people. We met up with dudes (read: bros) some people that SE knew and joined a table with them. Cool guys from... Australia and... maybe some other English-speaking places. Everyone scattered for a while and SR educated me on the Netherlands. According to her, the stereotype of people from Sweden is that they're all beautiful, blonde, spend all of their time at IKEA, and love meatballs. I confirmed that this is, indeed, the stereotype of Swedish people. And though she patently denied that this is true, I found out through the course of our conversation that she used to work at... drumroll please... IKEA! And, AND she happens to love meatballs. I'll chalk that one up as a win for this guy.

The girls got shwasteyfaced to a stupid degree and continued onto the next bar with the bros. SE and I called it a night around 2am and walked back to the hostel. There's something pretty special about walking through an unknown street in a foreign country in peacefulness of the middle of the night. Did we run into livestock roaming the streets on the way home? You betcha.

Go on to Goa Part 5: William, My New Entrepreneur Friend