chica o chico?

September 17, 2013

Anoche fue muy extraño....I met up with Ali in Chueca, the gay district in Madrid, for a drink. First of all, literally everyone in that neighborhood is gay. We walked around and saw a bar with a big fat bouncer outside and blacked out windows that had signs for a show starting in 15 minutes. Drag show? Sex show? We didn't know, but we wanted to go!

So we walk in and sit at the bar and order 2 drinks. The bar is completely silent, only about 5 gay guys in there and no one is talking except for us. We soon realize every person in there is staring directly at us.

We play it cool, just keep talking, and then a guy taps me on the shoulder and asks if "tienes coca?" and wipes his nose.

Play it cool for about 5 more minutes, but these guys' stares are so unwavering we just decide to bolt out of there.

We pick a place that looks a little more packed, with a few more women, and go in. We order 2 mojitos, talk for a bit, and then get bought 2 more mojitos by these two English guys who are in Madrid "on holiday."

They want to take us to Mercado de San Antonio after, but it's closed. Me and Ali both decide we're bored of making small talk with these two guys, so we decide to go into a drag show in hopes they'll leave. They don't.

We go in, get 2 drinks, go to the bathroom and when we come back don't stand anywhere near them. Ali and I are the only two girls in this jam packed bar, with 2 drag queens lip syncing on the little stage. We befriend Dalton, a British gay guy on holiday, who translates for us when the drag queen talks and makes fun of us (which is easy because we're 2 little white girls in a Spanish gay bar on a Monday night).

The 2 British guys find us again, tell us they get the hint and are leaving, kiss us on the cheek and tell us to "not me so mean." Whatever boys, you follow 2 girls into a drag club, clearly we aren't looking to get any tonight.

We decide it's time to go eventually, and want one more bar and one more drink for the night. We find this really cool old Vermouth bar that's empty, but has all these old bottles around it and paintings and tiles, so we befriend the bartender and sit down in the empty place.

I get red, Ali gets white, they put it in little water cups, and the bartender sits with us as we pick his brain as to where we should travel to Halloween weekend (since that's open for us right now). He suggests Budapest actually, which is convenient because Nicole is going that weekend to stay with her family and really wants people to go with her.

We take a cab back to our places, I eat a couple digestive cookies and steal a pear from my host family's kitchen, and then I get my best surprise of the night! Dylan booked his plane tickets to come in LESS THAN TWO WEEKS from now! He's arriving Monday September 30 and staying until Sunday October 6!!!!!!!!!!!!!