Paceville

The last couple nights have been spent socialising and meeting new people... aka going out and getting my swagger on. I figure that once my course officially starts I will get into S.A.S (serious about success) mode and spend a lot more time reading than partying. On Thursday night we went to an international student’s party at Q bar; I’m proud to say that I was much classier at this welcome party in comparison to the one at MC2 in Grenoble so, pat on the back for that. Last night we went to Paceville, the club district in Malta. A note on the name itself... it’s pronounced Patch-a-ville, not Pace-ville or Peace-town as some people like to think it’s called. Anyway, I don’t know when bars close there but if they do, they it’s probably around 8 in the morning. There’s not much you can say about a club district but I find it funny the way that English is not everyone’s first language and even when we struggle to communicate, we can always find a common ground in music. No matter what club you go to in the world, the scene is always the same: girls dance, boys watch- some feel it necessary to grope you, and sometimes – not always (but more frequently for me) - you encounter the smelly-spits-on-your-face-whilst-speaking-to-you-guy. Good times. The one thing I still have to get used to here is the smoking. Everyone smokes, and those who don’t smoke normally, smoke when they drink. As a result, my hair smells like an ashtray. Gross. 

Anyway, despite weird encounters with people, I really did have fun last night and got home at 4 in the morning, but I almost didn’t get home at all. Here’s a lesson to learn: if you pay for a bus to take you and bring you back from Paceville, make sure you get on the same bus you came on. Four of us flagged down what we thought was our bus but it turned out that all the buses look the same and our driver thought it was a good idea to drive at 150 kilometres an hour over speed bumps and winding roads. Since he wasn’t our original driver, he wanted us to pay for our near death experience. He threatened to call the police, and called me a bum (which I found funny since he was taking me to my home...). The best part was that he said if we don’t pay, he was going to drive us back to Paceville because we were wasting his time; I’m not sure what his logic was with that. And so, in the end I thought it better to pay they guy to get him to leave us alone.