Monday 18th – A Quiet Night Out in Manhattan

In Bath you can go out on a Monday night and have a good time. There are clubs and bars that are packed with people drinking, dancing, and generally having a good time. Obviously this is helped by Monday being the student night in Bath, but the same is true for most other major cities in the UK. However, the same does not appear to be true in Manhattan. On Monday night, Gill, Kirsty, Dave and I all wandered into the city, holding high expectations of what to expect from another night out in the city. We’d been out in the city on a Sunday night and had a good time, so a Monday should have been no problem. We were wrong.
We got off the train at Penn Station and immediately jumped into a yellow cab. We asked the taxi driver to take us to somewhere that would be lively on a Monday night, and to be honest we thought we’d end up somewhere good. Instead, the taxi driver drove us around the same block four times, and then dropped us at a lap-dancing club. If it had just been me and Dave, then we may have considered going in. But with two girls in tow, there was no way we were going to be spending the night looking at boobs.
So we got out and walked through Times Square, eventually settling on one of about a thousand Irish bars that are littered all over New York. The bartender in there was all too happy to point us in the direction of the good part of New York (once we’d bought a drink of course), so we quickly drunk up and headed downtown into Greenwich Village, the party centre of the city. A couple of hours later, having spent ages walking, following directions and turning down various bars littered around the village, we ended up in a club that had come highly recommended by some people in a beer and wine bar that we’d stopped in previously. They’d promised us that ‘Big Fat Black Pussy Cat’ would be pumping on a Monday night and that we’d have an awesome time. It turned out to be an underground bar with a soul band playing. We had fun there, but it wasn’t really what we’d been expecting.

I’ve been waiting for a while before posting this entry because Gill and Kirsty went back out into the city on Saturday night, and I wanted to have something to compare our night out too. However, on getting back on Sunday morning, they said that they didn’t have much of a wild time either. We’ve decided since then that the main reason why going out in New York isn’t living up to expectations is because we don’t know where we’re going, and when all of the good bars and clubs are as spread out as they are in Manhattan, this makes things tricky.