And then I found one euro and twenty centimos

Thursday night after burying our faces in delicious pizza, something I've been craving for weeks, we headed to the Thursday night Erasmus party. It was being held at a new bar (new for Erasmus) and we thought it would be cool to expand our nightlife beyond Bairro Alto. The bar had a sort of movie theme going on, with director's clapboards and movie posters lining the walls. Movie posters of...Muppets. Reservoir Frogs, MIB (Muppets in Black), Kill Swill...imagine Miss Piggy wearing Uma Thurman's yellow tracksuit. Pretty classy. The only thing that made the place more disturbing was the presence of candles.

Candles. Open flames. In a bar where people are dancing.

My very first thought upon entering the bar and seeing the candles is "Well that's an accident waiting to happen." And sure enough, a little while into the party Gustavo yanked me away from the dance floor and said "One of the candles got knocked over. We need to get out of here." Awesome. Who the #@%! puts candles next to a dance floor?! That isn't just Portuguese apathy; that's plain stupidity. The bar owner comes pushing his way through the crowd while we looked for the rest of our friends. A circle had formed in the middle of the room with everybody backing away and I just kept thinking to myself that this is exactly how people die in nightclubs. Fires that lead to panic. Maybe a little dramatic, sure, but I was not about to take chances because somebody else was dumb enough to create such an obvious fire hazard.

Before the danger, the bar actually played a really good selection of music including a lot of 50s and swing music. Clearly there is no place better than a crowded dance floor surrounded by candles to attempt legitimate swing dancing. A group of Portuguese boys spent most of the time shouting at each other across the 10 feet of floor to the point where the music became more of a heavy metal/screaming swing kind of beat. I'm no expert, but I think this is a terrible combination. They also played Bon Jovi. I have never heard such an enthusiastic reception to "It's my Life" The Portuguese boys knew the words better than I did.

At one point before we left, Gustavo and I were trying to kick the glass pieces of a broken ashtray off the dance floor so as to avoid other possible calamities. Collectively between us, we found 1 euro and 20 centimos during this effort. Lesson to be learned? Sometimes if you pick up other people's messes you won't have to pay as much for your cab. Also, the Portuguese are apparently rather lax when it comes to fire safety and other hazards. This was enough of a reason to leave the creepy Muppet/fire hazard bar; the fact that we had a field trip commencing in five hours was another semi-major factor in our decision to go home.

All in all, a pretty typical Thursday night in Portugal.