Bar Crawling, Düsseldorf-Style

Saturday was the big "Best Düsseldorfer Bars" bar crawl, and it was definitely a change of pace from previous crawls I've been on -- swanky bars, free transport, welcome drink at each bar (9 bars for 16Euro). The unplanned side effects of this were that the crowd was much older than I expected -- I must have had at least thirty 50+ women elbow me out of the way to the bar during the night. And I didn't expect to see any parent-teen pairs, but I saw several (talk about a tough cockblock...). The drinks tended toward the sickly-sweet, low alcohol variety, with a few pleasant exceptions. One bartender, apparently trying to help us forget the crappy band playing, had a heavy hand with the gin, and we didn't complain.

Speaking of the band, there's a fine line for a singer between self-confidence and self-parody. The digeridoo-playing tool they had for a lead singer firmly planted himself on the latter side of the line. Their first song, "Tequila", was supposedly "by request", but I'm pretty sure the idiot just overheard a drink order -- too bad Gin and Juice wasn't a popular drink. Anyway, Toolio proceeded to screw up the easiest song ever to sing -- you just shout "tequila" at all the long pauses. Nope. His rendition was to shout "Tequila" at any pause, interspersed with a random "let's party!". Of course, when he WAS supposed to say "tequila" he was in the midst of a craptacular dig solo. Wow.

(Un)Fortunately, he soon gave way to a woman who was inspired to sing by Aretha Franklin's style, Mariah Carey's range-jumping technique and the incompetence of the New York Knicks . You know the type -- loud white girl confused by American Idol into thinking that anyone can sing well. Fortunately, the strong drinks carried us on to further stops in the crawl...