adventures in baltimore

Baltimore is not the most interesting place on Earth but it is quite pretty and has lots of beautiful old buildings, like this one in the picture which I think is the cathedral. But then, sitting in a hotel attending conference sessions is not the way to gauge how interesting a city is. Going out on the town on a Saturday night and bar-hopping is. So in the interests of fairness to the city and its reputation, I did just that. Let's call it research.

My first stop, The Grand Central, was a pretty nice gay bar with usual range of people - older, gay scene stalwarts at the pool tables, straight girls with handbags (and I mean that in a couple of ways), the self-styled centre-of-attention pretty-boy. And tourists like me and my spunky new Spanish friends Jorge (who lives in Kansas) and Raquel (who now lives in Baltimore). Raquel came up to me and said Jorge had noticed me at the conference, so I joined them and proceeded to encourage us all to have many more drinks across a range of venues. Gay nightlife looks pretty much the same in Baltimore as everywhere else I've been, so no great revelations or surprises. But learning that alcohol is not available ANYWHERE after 1am was a nasty surprise, which meant we had to take refuge in a late-night Lebanese bar which serves those enormous bong-like pipe things which got the three of us very gently stoned. Not even my hotel could help out with drinks. All in all, I think we did very well with limited resources available.

Next afternoon when Jorge had sadly flown home to Kansas, Raquel and I went to the John Waters neighbourhood Hamden which is very up-and-coming cool, like Williamsburg but smaller and with camp homages to John Waters movies everywhere, like in the photo below. I got the train back to New York and promptly went out for dinner with my new flatmate Derek and his friend Jimmy to the uber-slick Thai restaurant slash cocktail bar slash nightclub up the street, and it was here and later at a huge equally uber-slick Chelsea club called Hero that I proved to myself once again that mixed drinks in New York are generally at least twice as strong as in Sydney and that caution should be exercised. Perhaps I'll remember to do so next time.