This Looks Like A Happening Place.

This past weekend my friend Tim and I went to Montreal for a vacation. We stayed there for 4 days and returned on Tuesday. We left ‘early’ Saturday morning and I put it in quotations because it was not early by normal people standards but by our sleep in standards. He came and picked me up at 8:30 am and we were off. We stopped a few times along the way to get gas and of course a few Tim’s coffees, no road trip would be complete without. About 7 and a half hours we arrived at our hotel, after fighting the crazy Montreal traffic and finding a bank. We get in our room and relax both take a shower and get ready as we want to go out on the town for the night. By the time we are ready it is about 6:30 and we find ourselves just up the road from a nice restaurant we walk down and have supper.

After that we run out to a local convenient store and grab some beer, they had 2 for 1 Budwiser in a 1.18 liter bottle, for $9.99. That is pretty darn good by Canadian standards. We split the bill and go back to the hotel room to drink them down. After we get a good buzz going we look up the local bar scene where we can just bar hop. Looks like a good street is St. Catherine street, a lot of bars close together and coincidently in the middle of the gay strip. We grab a cab that was right outside the hotel and ask him in our most chopped up French to take us to St. Catherine street. Sitting buzzed in the back of a cab in a city that is unknown to us we were trusting him to take us to some bars. He dropped us off right outside of the gay villa. How did he know? Who cares this is my first experience EVER inside a gay bar let alone a whole community. We were both so excited to be there. We walked from one end to the other just to get a feel for the place and then started to pick places out that we wanted to go in. One place had a drag queen sitting out front and said “Bon Soir” in the most seductive way that I have ever heard anyone say to Tim and even gave him bedroom eyes, we kept walking but said bon soir back to him, nowhere near as seductive though. We kept on walking and came to a bar that had people in it and thought that it was a good idea to go in. There were mostly guys in there, so we got a beer and sat at a table in the corner. I was a little intimidated being my first gay bar, but it seemed pretty normal. We drank our beer and was on to the next bar. Again normal a lot of men, drank a few and moved on to one where there might be a few more women around. As Tim is not gay he just wanted me to find a woman, or someone to talk to. By this point in the night we were pretty drunk and we were just looking for a place that was ‘happening’. Then we saw it, the one everyone was going into and it even looked like there were girls in there! We entered. We had to pay a $5 cover charge so we knew it must be good. We get in and Tim whispers in my ear, “this place is a good one, people are dancing and there are even girls, you have to get on that stage and dance with them!” I told him I would after we got a beer, so we walk over to the bar and get a drink, as I am talking to Tim I see the most gorgeous woman walk past me. She is a waitress at the bar, so naturally I point her out to Tim and tell him that, that is the ‘type’ of girl that I am into. He understood, she was very pretty. So as we get our beer we turn around to a stage that is now clearing of people. We are at this point confused as to what is going on because we thought that it was a dance club. We get pushed to the back of the room from the sheer volume of people and finally find ourselves looking at the stage.

A guy in drag comes walking out on stage and starts to sing, everyone is hooting and hollering, Tim and I look at each other and say “what the?”, looks like we walked into the only drag club on the street. We should have known by the guy outside dressed up in drag but since we both blatantly ignored him on the way in we were not prepared for what we were about to see. It was actually quite entertaining; there was a bachelorette party going on which explains all the girls in the bar. They had an MC who was quite amusing, she would switch between French and English so we caught bits of what she was saying. The dancers were singing and dancing around the stage, everyone was in good spirits and was having a good time. For our first time I would have to say that it was a memorable first time. We stayed until close watching all the performers and then got into a cab who took us back to our hotel by some miracle and we made it to our rooms. Somehow we had our wits about us to drink water and take Motrin before we crawled into our respective beds for the night.