The good, the bad, and the local

I hadn't expected to be doing much drinking when I was down in Hong Kong last month, but...

Well, it was my first time back there in 16-and-a-half years, so I had some catching up to do.

As on previous visits, though, I was severely unimpressed with most of the places around Central - wanky, overpriced bar-cum-restaurant joints catering to well-to-do CBD types on their way home from work. The place my journo buddy suggested for a Friday evening rendezvous was so spectacularly awful, I have expunged its name from my mind (and, curiously, I can find no trace of it online either: it hides in amongst the dozens of other similarly pricey and charmless venues in that area). The locally produced craft brew wasn't bad, and was one of the more reasonably priced things on the menu - but, even so, it produced convulsions in the wallet. (OK, part of the pain is psychological. When I visited in the '90s, the Hong Kong dollar was more or less at parity with the Renminbi, if not slightly more valuable; now it's slumped to barely 80% of the Renminbi, so price comparisons look even more startling until you remember to adjust for this.) They'd pissed me off within seconds of arrival, with their ineptly pushy staff and a cluttered menu that made it difficult to differentiate the prices for various items (some beers available on draught and in bottles, in different measures, and at regular and 'happy hour' tariffs; this degree of complexity wouldn't be a problem if you had all the information more clearly laid out!). I then got even more pissed off when I discovered that the 'happy hour' discount on most items was negligible - and immediately wiped out by an inconspicuously advertised 'service charge'. If the drinks were wince-makingly expensive, the food was just ridiculous: something like 80 or 100 HKD for a plate of nachos?! When my friends eventually showed up, they paid a similarly exorbitant amount for a small and really rather nasty-looking pizza. I must get them to remind me of the name of this place, so that I can castigate it more fully - and avoid ever going back there (I now recall, with a shudder of loathing, that it was The Hop House).

Alas, I don't hold out much hope of finding anywhere better. Hong Kong is just too frigging affluent to foster any bars of the sort that I would like.

The closest I'm likely to find is.... The Beer Bay! Yes, what a pleasant surprise this discovery was. A charming Anglophile called Annie (she did a Hospitality degree in England a few years back, and became an enthusiast for English ales) has set up a kiosk just opposite the exit of the Star Ferry Terminal in Central selling a wide variety of beers, bottles and draught (though only in plastic glasses, of course), from England and elsewhere, for barely half the price you'd pay in a lot of the proper bars nearby. Even more exciting to me, though, than the availabilty of affordable draught Boddington's down by the waterfront was the fact that Annie has also become a connoisseur of English pub snacks, and has gone to some trouble to source a range of munchies that you can't readily find even in Hong Kong, let alone around the rest of East Asia - Walker's Crisps, Poppadom Crisps, Pork Scratchings!! I'll definitely be going back there.

However, since the journo buddy who was kindly putting me up lives out in Shek O (a cosy little commuter community in what was once a sleepy fishing village down in the south-east corner of the island), I was hanging out there most of the time. The village's Back Beach Bar, only a couple of minutes from my friend's house, has become a magnet for the island's less well-off expats. It's very barebones: a long hut acts as the serving area; there's nowhere to sit inside, but Ben the owner gets away with colonising a section of the adjacent seawall promenade to use as his terrace. There's no draught beer, and only two or three bottled options - but Brooklyn Lager at 20 HKD is quite a bargain for Hong Kong. There's no price list either, that I was able to discover; but a standard range of spirits and mixed drinks (and some decent wines) seem to be available from the little backroom, and again at very reasonable prices (I think a large gin & tonic was 25 or 30 HKD). Ben also has Walker's Crisps, too (that alone would make me think seriously about possibly relocating to Hong Kong). I wasn't impressed by the music selection (a few of the regulars forced their way behind the bar to adjust the playlist - but didn't seem to be able to improve things much), yet for once I think I can forgive that. It is a rare joy to be able to drink relatively cheaply, in the open air, with the sound of the surf breaking on the beach just a few yards away. And the place has a nice vibe of being a bit of a 'secret' for the locals. The tiny 'back beach' is somewhat obscure, compared to the main swimming beach a few hundred yards away on the other side of the peninsula. The bar is in fact barely sixty seconds from the main bus stop on the edge of the village, but those not in the know would struggle to find it among Shek O's claustrophobic and labyrinthine back-alleys.

I was also pleased to find that the open-air Thai/Chinese restaurant in the middle of the village is still there - remarkably unchanged, it would seem, in nearly 20 years (it was the first place I ever drank in Hong Kong, in March 1994). I didn't find the Thai items on the menu particularly impressive, and the prices are a bit steep (28 HKD for a local beer, albeit in a big bottle, is pretty outrageous!); but it is a very mellow place to hang out and watch the world go by - and to wallow in nostalgic reminiscences of drinking there when I was still young....

Top Five Bars in Cambodia

12th AUGUST 2016

Just a few days after I shuttered this blog, as I was in the midst of finalising my intended departure from China for good.... out of the blue I was offered quite an exciting new job, which kept me in China for another two-and-a-half years or so. At least it got me out of Beijing, moved me down to the Suzhou-Hangzhou-Shanghai area. I was completely burnt out on Beijing; but I was pretty much done on China too, and after having to endure another couple of years of the place, I was determined I had to leave and never come back.

During this rather fraught 'China extension', I had the good fortune to discover Cambodia for the first time. Well, I had long been interested in, fascinated by the country. And I had laid plans for an extended visit when I quit Beijing at the beginning of 2013 - but got deterred by the likely difficulty of travelling there around the time of the late King Sihanouk's funeral. In fact, I didn't manage to make my first trip there until Christmas 2014. I took to it at once, and returned twice more within the next few months..... and then relocated permanently to Phnom Penh towards the end of 2015.

By August 2016, after considerable travels around the country, I am in a position to add a little 'Best Bars in Cambodia' roundup to my old drinking blog here (sneakily backdated into my 'Farewell Tuesday').

Yes, it is a little sad that there are no Phnom Penh bars in this list. Perhaps I haven't researched my 'home turf' quite enough yet. I have in fact spent very nearly as much time 'on the road' visiting other parts of the country as I have 'at home' in PP. And I have for most of this past year been drinking only very moderately, or not at all - very different from my wild Beijing days of a few years ago! When I'm off 'on holiday', I let my hair down a little bit, sup a little more. While in PP, I spend much of my time hunkered down in my very pleasant apartment, and sometimes don't venture out from one week to the next. (Also, I worry that I may be something of a jinx: the two best beloved watering-holes of my early months here were both soon demised - one fatally losing its mojo after just a couple of months of near-perfect-bar-ness, and its replacement in my drinking affections being suddenly demolished a scant three months after that! This city, alas, suffers many of the same woes of hasty, greedy, ill-conceived 'development' as Beijing. I have caught it on the cusp of momentous changes, and I fear that everything I now love about it is likely to be swept away in the next few years.)

Moreover, the majority of Phnom Penh bars come up seriously lacking in one way or another. The city has an awful lot of bars, but most of them aren't really much good; and even the good ones are a long way short of great. (It's not quite so ill-served as Siem Reap, which is a very, very disappointing bar town; or the big coastal resort of Sihanoukville, which is the armpit of the world, surely the ugliest city in SE Asia... and has not a single decent bar.) There will probably be a 'Top Five Bars in Phnom Penh' post appearing shortly, but for now.... here's my pick of The Best from the rest of Cambodia.

The Top Five Bars in Cambodia

5)  Picasso (Siem Reap)

Picasso is a challenge to find: very inconspicuous signage, not open during the daytime, hidden down a tiny back-alley (but parallel to and just yards away from the raucous awfulness that is the city's main 'Pub Street'). And it's a terrible name for a bar, a name that cries "twee bistro food" rather than "hardcore dive bar". But the latter is what it is, and thank god for it. I think it used to be more of a tapas type of place in its early days, but it has gradually evolved into the city's best drinking den. It's the decor that makes it: an arched faux brick ceiling gives it the grungy intimacy of a cellar bar (although it's actually at ground level). And it has a long, stone-topped U-shaped bar, almost a complete 'island'; it's the only one of its kind I've found in the country, and it is quite magical how it conduces to opening up casual conversations with other drinkers - whether next to you, or on the opposite side of the narrow room.  The feisty young manager, an Aussie girl called Sam, also plays a big part in maintaining the friendly, chatty atmosphere of the place. Cheap drinks and a small but good offering of bar snacks - and an ongoing obsession with trying to set a new Jenga world record - complete its appeal. It's one of the most sociable bars in the country - and streets ahead of anything else in Siem Reap. Its all-evening 'happy hour' on Wednesdays is one of the country's great drinking events too, a rather dangerous attraction (it's not wise to schedule your bus out of Siem Reap on a Thursday!!).

4)  Indo Bar (Kampot)

Again, a pretty terrible name, but... this unassuming little spot, on a quiet street a block or two in from the river, has managed to recreate the ambience of a traditional British pub - the only place I know in the country to have pulled this off (having the cheery young Brit owner behind the bar most of the time certainly helps; but there are a lot of other foreign-owned bars around, especially in this town, that dismally fail to conjure any particular atmosphere or character). The TV behind the bar is fairly small, but it makes it a good spot for watching football matches (well, it's pretty much the only option in town for this). And they offer a small but very good (and very generously portioned) selection of Indian set meals from the nearby Curry House (I think there's some shared ownership between the bar and the restaurant). My only gripe is that the bar itself is tiny, and you usually have to arrive pretty early in the evening if you're going to stake a claim to one of the handful of barstools. (This is a common problem with the footprint of the typical 'Chinese shop-house' property - long and narrow. If I were turning one of these spaces into a pub, I'd put the bar along the side wall, not at the end of the room.)  [Well, damn - the jinx strikes again! I returned to Kampot just after writing this post, and discovered that Indo had closed down over the summer of 2016. Oh Neil's (see below), luckily, is still going strong. But Kampot becomes a much less compelling destination when its number of attractive boozers is reduced to ONE.]

3)  The Riverside Balcony (Battambang)

Does exactly what it says on the label! Not a terrible name, this time, though rather unimaginatively prosaic - but we're probably stuck with it now. I gather this place has been going for several years, was one of the first foreign bars to open in Battambang - but had got itself a bit of a bad reputation under the last owner. Since the end of 2015, it's been taken over by a young Scot and his Australian girlfriend, and they have completely revitalized it. It is a lovely, lovely space, a large covered terrace on the first floor of a traditional wooden stilt house, overlooking the small river in the bucolic southern fringes of Battambang. The only reason this doesn't make the top spot is that it's a bit too fancy: it feels more like a 'special occasion' kind of drinking destination, somewhere you'd go on a date rather than just for everyday tippling. The temptation to explore their interesting list of cocktails (and/or their very fine selection of single malt Scotches) threatens to make it a bit too expensive for a regular haunt, too. But there is no finer place in the whole country to slake the day's thirst while watching the dusk gently fall, and I make a point of dropping in at least once or twice whenever I'm passing through Battambang. (Their pizzas are also extremely good, and boast some unusual but very effective combinations of toppings.) I am amazed - and resentful! - that there is nothing like this, nothing remotely as good as this in the capital.

2)  Here Be Dragons (Battambang)

OK, this name is perhaps a bit too determinedly quirky, and it doesn't quite fit the traditional templates for bar-naming - but it works. It's actually a very apposite warning, given the hazards of repeated and prolonged drinking that beckon within: it is the 'Bermuda Triangle' of Battambang! On the quiet east bank of the river, just north of the Wat Sangke temple, Here Be Dragons is one of the country's most popular backpacker dorms. (My days of slumming it in ultra-cheap bunk beds are behind me; but, luckily, they have a few quite decent - and also very cheap - private rooms upstairs, so it has become my favoured place to stay in the city.) By some happy alchemy, the young Brit couple who own the place have managed to create such a welcoming atmosphere that many people who arrive anticipating just a couple of days' battery-recharging before they head on to Siem Reap or Phnom Penh or Thailand, end up.... staying rather longer.... sometimes indefinitely. Most of the bar staff are backpackers who couldn't bear to leave. That's how fabulous this bar is! And in addition to its lively - though mostly transient (and mostly very, very young) - population of guests, it's also established itself as the major social hub for much of the expat community there. It tops Picasso [above] as a sociable bar because it's super-lively almost every night of the week (not just Wednesdays) and you're likely to meet a broad mix of people, many of them long-term residents in the city (not just tourists). The food is - mostly - very good, and the menu's extremely varied; the prices are pretty cheap; and they put on a slew of special events (cheap cocktails all night every Friday, themed parties or live music events most Saturdays, the best trivia quiz in the country on Wednesdays). Ah yes, and they don't really close. Nominally, they do, at about 12.30. But the barmen usually like to have a few to unwind themselves after that; and if the owner's in, he'll often settle in for an all-night session. This is the only place in the country where I have found myself repeating my crazy Beijing lifestyle, staying up drinking until 2am or 3am for days in succession (I fear I don't have the stamina to do that at all regularly any more; but it is nice to be able to revisit that over-indulgence just once in a while). The only slight demerit (there's always one!) is that, owing, I believe, to some cock-up in Imperial-to-Metric conversion, the bar is absurdly too high; and the rickety rattan stools you are obliged to perch on if you want to be able to lean your elbows on it are ridiculously uncomfortable. I hope that one day they'll make enough money to rip it out, and replace it with one about 8" or 10" lower. It might then become the perfect bar.....

But for now, I give the coveted top spot to.......

1)  Oh Neil's (Kampot)

Yep, yet another terrible name - but a wonderful, wonderful bar. There are many other bars on the Kampot riverfront offering views of the often spectacular sunsets beyond the Elephant Hills on the far side of the river, but this is by far my favourite. The ambience is more thatched-roof tiki bar than Irish boozer, but in a tropical climate, this seems to work; in fact, this place seems to combine the best of Irish and Caribbean culture (as my favourite bar back in Oxford 25 years ago briefly did). Actually, the Irishness is confined to a few Irish whiskeys behind the bar, and a few Irish items on the menu (I was delighted to find colcannon here - for the first time in years! - but disappointed that the Irish stew, though heartily thick, is made with beef rather than mutton). The general feel of the place is more American, with background music - played at sensibly audible-but-not-obtrusive volumes - sourced from online radio stations specialising in blues and classic rock. Owner Neil seems a nice guy, and is usually on hand himself - in the evenings, at least - to make sure all is running smoothly; although there's never too much of a worry about that, as he has managed to find himself some unusually friendly and efficient Cambodian bar staff. And, unlike nearby Indo [above, in the No. 4 spot], the bar is along the side wall, affording plenty of barstool perches (even so, the place is so popular that it can be difficult to get a seat). Excellent food, excellent service, excellent music, keen prices, and a super view from the small outdoor seating area at the front - this is dangerously close to 'bar perfection'. The fly-in-the-ointment here is the clientele: mostly quite middle-aged, nearly all expat rather than tourist - not nearly as varied as in most of the other venues on this list. Moreover, Kampot expats can seem tiresomely smug and self-satisfied: they're often rather too pleased with themselves that they were able to retire early and set up a moderately successful business there, or just that they were among the first to 'discover' that Kampot was the coolest spot in the entire country. I've had a number of interesting conversations at Oh Neil's, but on the whole I prefer the company (largely NGO workers) at Here Be Dragons; it's a very tight call between those two, for me. Oh Neil's just edges it on the food... and the music... and the hint of Irishness (I'm such a Plastic Paddy!).

Mike's Bar

Being on the road, and trying out some new bars over the last few weeks, I've found my mind wandering back to past travels and fortuitous bar discoveries of years gone by. Perhaps I've also been subsconsciously fretting that there are certain subjects I really should have covered on this blog, and will now never get around to, because I'm closing it down next week.

This is what brought Mike's to mind.

Mike's Bar (now, apparently, styling itself Mike's Irish Bar, although I'm pretty certain the 'Irish' is new; and it's the kind of pointless affectation that would be likely to put me off a place), is a large British-style pub in the centre of Athens, and I spent a week or so there over Christmas and New Year, in the middle of the spell that I spent working in Toronto.

Yes, I spent pretty much the whole week in that pub. My hotel accommodation began to seem superfluous, because there were at least a couple of occasions when I stayed in Mike's all night, and only went back to the hotel at dawn for breakfast.

Now, in fact, there was a much smaller, darker, and cosier pub just a few minutes' walk away (whose name I have entirely forgotten, I'm afraid), which would have been my preference for an evening hangout, but Mike's Bar had the advantages of large size and convenient proximity to the hotel, ensuring that it immediately won broad popularity among the group I was part of. It achieved a critical mass which made it impossible to lobby for any alternative rendezvous, it became the essential default boozing option for the duration of the holiday.

The group I was with was large and aggressively sociable and - for the most part - very hard-drinking. I was there for the World Universities' Debating Championship - an event I'd had experience of judging when at Oxford some years before, and had become involved in again while at Bar School. Well, I had been President of my Inn's debating society that year, but had selflessly abstained from picking myself to attend glamorous overseas events as a competitor (a level of ethical restraint rarely displayed by other holders of this office, I discovered); however, I worked my butt off in that job, and by the end of my term of office I thought I had earned a small treat for myself. And since Athens - the next designated host of the 'Worlds' event - was a relatively inexpensive trip, I thought it would be reasonable to volunteer my participation as a judge and thus get myself a little expenses-paid winter holiday.

And so it was that I got to hang out for 8 or 10 days with 1,000 or more boozy students. But at least competition debaters tend to be amongst the brightest and best of the student population. And also, in fact, amongst the most mature: a good number of them, probably the majority in fact, are graduate students, or members of certain professional guilds or vocational training schools or institutes of higher learning that aren't strictly universities (like my own Middle Temple). I'd say the average age was at least 25, and I was still only in my early 30s myself at this time. So, it was a very convivial crowd. And after the first 4 or 5 days, when a mini-league system involving all of the hundreds of teams winnowed down the field to just 16 or 32 teams for the final knockout rounds, most of us were left with nothing to do during the day - except catch up on the sleep we hadn't had the night before. (I initially felt quite bad about not making more of being in Athens, but I had visited the city twice before, done most of the standard sightseeing; and everything was closed over the holidays, anyway.)

Greece is probably my favourite country in the world. I love the sense of openness and generosity towards strangers that you find everywhere, the notion of hospitality that has been at the heart of their culture for thousands of years. (A favourite example from a visit a few years before: I'd been drinking with a friend at a table beside the harbour for a few hours. When we settled up, the bill seemed rather high; I suspected they'd inadvertently added a few drinks that had been ordered on the next table. Anywhere else in the world, the customer might start feeling paranoid about the likelihood of a deliberate scam, and the staff would probably get exaggeratedly defensive, and it might end in a lengthy and awkward wrangle, at the least, perhaps a stand-up fight. In Greece, I knew it was almost certainly an honest mistake, and queried it as such. The waiter immediately acknowledged that he might well have goofed, and asked me how much I'd like to pay. I think I happily paid rather more than my actual tab, because it was such a delightful way of handling a dispute.)

I suspect this national emphasis on the virtue of hospitality explains why the Greeks are almost always so good at running restaurants and bars, even restaurants and bars of an alien kind. Most people make a complete pig's ear of trying to emulate another country's food or its bar culture (the Chinese interpretation of Thai food being my particular bugbear here in Beijing). But the Greeks, bless 'em, somehow they manage to do it right.

The eponymous owner of Mike's Bar is not English or Irish or American, but Greek through and through. And yet he has managed to create one of the best large-scale pubs I've ever been in. 

I suspect, though, that dear Mike never sussed out why all these young foreigners were suddenly flooding into his bar every night, or how soon they would depart again. He had a bonanza week or so, was ordering extra kegs and hiring extra staff to keep the beer flowing all night, every night. I hope the adjustment back to his regular level of custom wasn't too painful for him.

Three Postscripts:

I may perhaps have been driven to drink more self-destructively than is usual for me because I was still smarting from a painful breakup six months earlier - and, as Fate would have it (Cruel Fate!), she was there. And having a fling with someone else, I soon learned.

My principal drinking companions on this trip were a daffy pair of Belgian accountants (it remained obscure as to how they were eligible to be taking part in a student competition), who introduced me to the useful term liquid sandwiches - to describe beer consumed in lieu of lunch.

These two Belgians caused some consternation to the hotel staff, when it appeared that they had consumed the entire contents of their heavily - and, of course, expensively - stocked mini-bar in a single night. In fact, they had merely transferred all of the miniature bottles of spirits and so on to a sock drawer, so that they could pack their fridge full of beer.

Toronto locals

The other day, I was reflecting for a moment - for reasons which now escape me - on the time I spent in Toronto about 15 years ago, working as a legal intern.

My scholarship programme provided quite a nice apartment for me, down near the waterfront on Queen's Quay. And I had a bar in my building. One of the strangest bars I have ever encountered - the Purple Pepper, a bar chiefly notable for its name: a deeply naff but undeniably very memorable alliteration. The Pepper, alas, didn't really feel much like a bar, since it was in a mall. Well, in the middle of a rank of shops along the ground floor of this block (the dry cleaners and the 24-hour supermarket and, especially, the great little takeaway pizza joint on the corner were all very welcome facilities to have within 5 minutes of home, but the Pepper was nothing but a disappointment). And hence it was a bit of a goldfish bowl, with floor-to-ceiling plate glass windows along the front. At least it was quite cosily dim inside - after nightfall - and the 'purple' motif was quaintly underscored with a purple lava lamp behind the bar (I'm a big fan of lava lamps: I could watch them for hours!).

There was also a rather beautiful Eastern European (Croatian, possibly - I forget) girl who worked behind the bar there a few evenings a week. But even this was not enough to entice me into becoming a regular. The place lacked atmosphere. Nor, indeed, did it have very much custom. It was a little expensive. And the service - from the gorgeous Croatian, and everyone else - tended to be a bit offhand and surly. [It seems the Pepper is still going after all these years, but is now promoting itself more as a café/restaurant.]

That, I found, was a more widespread problem in Canada, or certainly in Toronto. Canadians have a rather gratingly self-righteous pride about their supposed superiority to their American neighbours: they seem to believe - with overbearing earnestness - that their country is better in every way than the USA, and that they are a fundamentally nicer people than the Americans. And I'm afraid it just ain't so - not in the country's service culture, anyway. Whereas the almost ubiquitous "Have a nice day!" attitude you find in America usually seems genuine, or at least well faked, in Canada serving staff mostly seem as if they are just going through the motions. There's no perkiness, no breeziness, no friendliness. It wasn't just in the Pepper, but every bar I went in during that year in Toronto (and a fair few in other places I visited, too: Montreal, Ottawa/Hull, Quebec City, Edmonton, Vancouver). Even worse, bar staff there used to aggressively demand their tips, rather than just accepting that tipping was ultimately a matter for the customer's discretion. In America, I don't mind tipping, and tipping heavily - because bar staff give value: they're pleasant and friendly to you, they make conversation if you're on your own, they introduce you to other people at the bar; they'll quite often give you a complimentary drink every once in a while; and they almost invariably slice a big chunk off your tab at the end of the evening, if you've been a good customer. In Canada, they give you your drink, and ask for a tip. That's it. No smile, no chit-chat, nada. I soon grew to hate going to bars in Canada: it was more expensive than in the States, and not nearly as much fun.

Insofar as I did have a local in Toronto (the severe winters are a serious deterrent to going out; and I was away travelling a lot, anyway), I came to favour the Acme Bar & Grill, just around the corner. It was about a 10-minute walk away, but that's no bad thing. (A 'local' can be too local. There's not really any extra convenience in having a favourite bar only 2 minutes away rather than 5 or 10 - and 'convenience' is overrated anyway! - but the reduction in daily exercise can become significant.) Of course, it was the Wile E. Coyote reference that initially attracted me. And it did seem like a very promising venue: long, narrow, essentially windowless - nice and dark, lots of wood; almost the paradigm of the perfect (North) American bar. It had a pretty decent food menu too. Again, it was the frosty demeanour of the staff that let it down. If this place had been over the border in Michigan, I'm sure I would have enrolled it amongst my favourite bars of all time; but my experiences here were always undercut by irritation and disappointment with the service. [I learn that the Acme was relaunched as the more British-sounding Duke of Argyle in the early Noughties, and closed altogether a few years ago, when the area was redeveloped. I would like to summon up a little wistful regret, but I find myself unable to.]

Perverse and bizarre as it may seem, my 'local' during that year became the wonderful T. Hogan's - some 300 miles away in Philadelphia!

That's how much Canada's bars SUCKED.

HBH 311

The distant city teems

Cool night breeze ruffles the sea

Lights on the harbour

Ah, back in Hong Kong - for the first time in 16 years.

I had one of the most exquisite evenings of my life here, back in the early '90s, sitting on the terrace of the Royal Hong Kong Yacht Club, watching night fall, looking out across the bay at the lights of Kowloon - and enjoying the company of an utterly enchanting woman... who, unfortunately, was married.

We shared a taxi afterwards, and she invited me back to her place, "for a coffee" - oh, the cliché! I declined. It seemed her marriage was quite a loose arrangement, the husband working in Japan and rarely seeing her. But I have a rather stern ethical hang-up about adultery. Or I had back then. I have been tormented by curiosity and regret about this incident ever since (and I don't normally do regret). She was one of the handful of great infatuations of my life.

What was a low-life like me doing entertaining a glamorous merchant banker in the swank environs of the Yacht Club, you might well ask. Well, as it happens, I was (am?) a member. Well, a sort of affiliate member. My best friend's girlfriend at the time was the membership secretary of a rather exclusive yacht club in England, and - as a going-away present when I set out on my round-the-world backpacking year - she did an elementary bit of computer hacking to insinuate me on to their membership roll, so that I could enjoy visiting guest member rights at a string of affiliated clubs worldwide.

Though I was grateful for the goodwill demonstrated in this gift, I felt a bit guilty about its mild criminality. And I didn't think that I was ever likely to take advantage of it. But I did find it very useful in Hong Kong....

The Royal Hong Kong Yacht Club, with its prime harbourfront location, is one of the most desirable yet frustratingly unattainable venues on the island. It is strictly 'members only', and not many people can get to be members. Members can take in guests, but only members can pay for anything. And even members can't pay in cash (or by cheque or card); you have to use your member's tab for everything, and settle up at the end of each month by credit card.

I was staying with an old university friend who was working for a merchant bank, and I discovered that he and his friends and colleagues were all mad keen to have a chance to get inside the Yacht Club for once. Since he was putting me up for free and treating me rather generously throughout the two weeks I was there, a night out at the Yacht Club seemed to be an ideal way to thank him for his hospitality. Oddly enough, despite its high-tone vibe, it was one of the cheapest places to drink on the island (something I was much relieved to discover!).

Of course, as soon as I'd done it once, I was hooked on the experience, and went back two or three more times -  most notably for this marvellous 'date' with one of my friend's colleagues who I'd found myself falling into a dangerously flirtatious friendship with.

The guilty knowledge that I was an imposter there never quite left me, even though I was becoming something of a 'regular'; but the only moment of real alarm I experienced was on my preliminary visit, when I dropped in during the daytime to make sure that I would be able to set up a visiting guest member account with them. "Where are you moored?" they asked me. Oops - busted! My panic was fleeting. I calmly explained that I was on a business trip, and had flown in this time. Everything was fine. Until my heart got broken. I suppose that's karma, of a sort.

The Top Five Unusual Places I Have Drunk

Since I am away travelling for most of this month, I thought it would be appropriate to review a few memories of some of my more exotic drinking adventures. I think I've visited 18 countries outside of my native England. And I have drunk in nearly all, no, all of them. And in many of them, I have drunk some rather strange things in rather odd circumstances.

Here then is a list of...

My Top Five unusual places to have a drink

5)  An outhouse masquerading as a Jamaican beach

OK, a little bit of a cheat this one - not really abroad at all; just a grotty semi-detached house in East London. I've already written about this, in one of my earliest posts on here, nearly 6 years ago. When I was at Bar School in London, I shared a house with the aptly nicknamed Mad Irish Dave - like me, an enthusiastic drinker. One Sunday afternoon, bored out of our minds, we improvised a 'Jamaican Beach Party' - for just the two of us - in the 'Blue Room', a narrow little extension on the house that our landlord used mainly for storing his garden tools. It was cold and pokey, but it was painted in a very restful shade of blue; so we hauled our living room sofa in there, and pinned a Jamaican Tourist Board advertisement for Negril Beach in the middle of the blue wall opposite. Then we laid in stocks of rum and ganja, pooled our handful of reggae tapes... and proceeded to get absolutely blitzed for about 8 or 10 hours.

4)  The veranda of a rock star's bungalow

Yes, a real live rock star. Not that I ever met him. Which might be just as well, given that I had never heard of him, or his band. They'd had one very big, poppy sort of hit in the late 1960s (dimly familiar to me, but I'd had no idea who was playing it; still turns up regularly on Best of the Sixties compilations), and had been able to retire on the proceeds. Not many musicians seem to have the self-restraint to decide that they've made enough money, and just give up like that. This guy, one of the guitarists, I think, had sunk most of his money into a small coffee plantation on the upper slopes of the Blue Mountains in Jamaica. He'd become friendly with an old college buddy of mine (occasional haunter of these comment threads, The Mothman) who was studying means of controlling an insect pest that ate the leaves of the coffee plants, and let him stay in his bungalow high up the mountain whenever he was doing fieldwork up there. I went to visit The Mothman for a couple of weeks after finishing university, and got to spend a night or two in the guitarist's bungalow. Only a small place, but an absolutely gorgeous location - the kind of place where you could lean out of a window to pick fresh fruit for breakfast - and a gorgeous view, looking down on the lights of Kingston far below. We got a bit mashed up on the local rum one night...

3)  The cabin of a Yangtze river cruiser

One of my favourite memories of my first visit to China in the '90s. I was going upriver through the famous Three Gorges (the huge dam project at Yichang was just nearing completion, but they wouldn't start filling the reservoir for another year or two; so, this was one of the last chances to enjoy a lot of the scenery in the gorges before it was flooded) on a mid-price cruise ship - not quite the grottiest possible (not the like the boat I came back downstream on, which was nothing but a tramp steamer), but a long way short of the swanky affairs that the better-off Chinese and nearly all foreigners favoured; I was the only laowai on this boat, and hence something of an instant celebrity. One day, I got chatting to a trio of young men who invited me back to their cabin for a drink. I was staying in the second cheapest class of accommodation - bunk beds, sharing with a noisy Chinese family; but at least there was a little bit of space, and a small TV on the wall. These lads were staying in the cheapest class - two double bunk-beds crammed into such a small space that there was almost no standing room; but at least there were only three of them in a four-berth cabin. We couldn't understand each other much (my Chinese was better then than it is now, but not much), but we mugged and smiled our way through some general pleasantries about international goodwill. One of them, I gathered, had just got out of the army - possibly invalided out after an accident (he showed me an horrendous scar on his upper arm, a large piece of it missing; but it didn't seem very new, and I couldn't make out how it had happened) - and the others were two old schoolfriends who'd come to escort him the last part of the way home. We spent a pleasant hour or two drinking beer and baijiu.

2)  The roof of a train

There's only one rail line in Jamaica, winding through the mountainous interior of the island between the capital, Kingston, on the south coast, and the main tourist centre, Montego Bay, on the north coast. It's a single track, with a passing place at the mid-point, in the heart of the jungle high up in the mountains. One train sets out from each end once or twice a day, and whichever reaches the passing place first has to stop and wait... and wait, and wait. They're not big on keeping schedules, the Jamaicans. No, they're more of a party people. And it's a party train. Vendors pass constantly through the carriages selling bottles of the local Red Stripe beer (very palatable and deceptively strong) which they somehow manage to keep refrigerated. And if the weather's nice - which it mostly is - a lot of people head up on to the roofs of the carriages to get some fresh air. It's relatively safe, since the train only moves very slowly. But it does lurch alarmingly from side to side on occasion; and I wouldn't have wanted to be up there after drinking a lot of beers!

But in the top spot, it must surely be...

1)  A prison cell

I spent a month or so in Fiji when I was backpacking around the world in '94. I grew rather tired of the main island, Viti Levu, which is rather too intensively geared toward the fleecing of tourists, and is overrun with Australians. But towards the end of my stay, I took a boat across to the second island of Levuka (site of the British colonial capital) for a few days, and found that a much more laidback and amenable sort of place. As I mentioned a few weeks back, I had become rather partial to kava, the traditional ceremonial drink of the South Sea islands (it's made from the ground-up root of a plant of the pepper family; it looks a bit offputting - like a muddy puddle - and has a slightly chalky, gritty mouth-feel; but it's quite pleasant to drink, with a mild aniseedy flavour, and a prickly, gently numbing effect in the mouth; and it's very, very relaxing), and was always keen to find somewhere to partake. Asking at my hotel if they knew where I might be able to drink kava, I was told to try the police station. It had seemed as though it might have been a joke, but I didn't see any harm in checking it out. The two young Brits who'd latched on to me during the boat crossing earlier that day were extremely wary about the idea (perhaps having had unpleasant experiences with police stations back home), but I persuaded them to accompany me. And sure enough, the three coppers there - with little or no work to do in such a tiny and well-behaved town - were brewing up almost every night, and were more than happy to welcome us to join them. We had to move into one of the holding cells, though, to keep out of sight in case anyone should come in to report some rustic misdemeanour or other. They told us that they would probably mix another bowl later, if we wanted to keep going all night, but the first one kept us merry until getting on for midnight, and that seemed good enough. It had been a splendid evening, full of memorable conversation (the desk sergeant's tales of the time he spent in Cambodia with a UN peacekeeping force probably deserve a post of their own at some point; he claimed to have been held hostage by the Khmer Rouge). I worry that this experience may have created in me some unduly positive associations with police cells.

If they'd asked me...

I see The Beijinger magazine has started a new feature this month called 'A Drink With...', quizzing some notable on their personal drinking history. (Well, OK, I just noticed it for the first time this month. But I've been away for a while. And I don't read The Beijinger very often any more. Maybe it's been going a while.) This month's subject was Matthew Niederhauser, a young photographer noted for his portraits of Beijing's rock musicians.

I don't suppose they're ever likely to ask me (since I've spent the last ten years assiduously protecting my anonymity!), so I thought I'd borrow the format for a quick post of my own here.

A Drink With... Froog

Who would you most like to get drunk with?

Well, my friends, naturally. The Choirboy, foremost amongst those available to me in Beijing; and my old teaching buddy The Arts Entrepreneur, the most dearly missed of my drinking companions back in the UK.

However, the question is angling for a celebrity nomination (living or dead), so..... I did once have a drink with seminal 'Unsuitable Role Model' Jeffrey Bernard - so I don't think I can cite him for this. If I had a time machine, I think the drinker who has most fascinated me, and was most likely to be erudite and witty company, would be the Irish writer Brian O'Nolan. Amongst folks still with us, I'd like to say Tom Waits, but he renounced booze a couple of decades ago. I believe the Irish musician Jem Finer still tipples, though, and I bet he'd be excellent company on a wee bar crawl. I'd be interested to meet Paul Auster too, one of the few contemporary writers I really admire (not sure if or how much he drinks, but it seems likely he's not averse to the occasional snifter).

If you could only imbibe one drink for the rest of your life, what would it be?

I am reminded of a very wise joke I heard in early childhood: A group of newly deceased souls are given a choice on admission into the afterlife to nominate the food they'd most like to be able to eat for all eternity. Thinking they are about to enter Heaven, they all eagerly pick their favourite things... only to discover that having to eat the same thing all the time soon becomes HELL.

It would be a big mistake here to choose the drink you like most (probably, for me, single malt Scotch). Things you enjoy most powerfully tend also to pall the soonest, if you have no change from them. And spirits and cocktails are too scouring to the throat (and the liver!), too dehydrating to drink all the time. You have to pick something you're not going to tire of. That, for me, would be a beer of some kind - probably Guinness.

How old were you when you started drinking?

Well, I didn't start going into bars on my own that often until my last year of high school, when I was 17; but I had been doing so intermittently for a year or two prior to that. My parents had allowed me to drink with them in pubs (in a very modest way: shandy, rum'n'coke), and at home during the Christmas fortnight, from about the age of 11 or 12. The first time I was sick from drink, I think I was in fact only about 10 (accompanying my Dad on his Skittles Night, and being allowed a couple of bottles of Stella - far too much for my untrained tolerance!). However, the first time I was drunk - though happily so, and without being too seriously ill - was a little earlier even than that. My eccentric German grandmother got in the habit of giving me a flagon (2.5 litres, I think) of cider as a birthday present every year from the time I was about 8. Usually it was consumed as very weak cider shandy over the course of a few weeks. But in the second or third year she made this gift, my parents left me in the care of my elder brother for an evening, he was delinquent in his supervisory duties, and I quaffed most of the jug - well, whatever was left in it - in just a few hours. I was high as a kite, but, as far as I remember, I was not actually sick. That might have been a dangerously positive early experience of booze for me!!

Tell us about the first time you got drunk.

See answer above.

Tell us about the last time you were drunk.

The last time I was really drunk - in a doing embarrassing things and then forgetting them kind of way - was on my birthday last year. When I was a student, I used to get that drunk 3 or 4 times a week. In my mature years, it has lapsed to a few times a year, at most.

What's the dumbest thing you've done while drunk?

During my student years, I was walking home alone one night, very drunk (after a free tasting of port, sherry and madeira; I was on the Wines & Spirits Committee of the Oxford Union, and we'd just introduced a new range of fortified wines to be sold under the Union's own label, so this had been a small private party to commemorate the event - with unlimited supply), and I paused to collect an abandoned shopping trolley. I protest that I was motivated by public-spiritedness, since the Sainsbury's it came from was only a few hundred yards up the road and I was intending to return it. However, I started racing with it (against myself, just for the thrill of speed!), ran it against a kerb when I was running flat out, and was launched over the top of it - flying for a good 10ft or 15ft before landing face-first on a cement paving stone. It was only the softening effect of so much drink that prevented me from suffering a serious injury, although I suspect I gave myself quite a bad concussion.

What's your golden rule of drinking?

Know your limits. It's supposed to be fun, not self-harming.

Where's the dumbest place you've gone drinking?

Probably a rather dingy back alley in a small town in Fiji. I was drinking kava, the local 'herbal tea' (very mildly narcotic), rather than booze. I'd developed a taste for it, but was frustrated that there were few opportunities to indulge (it's an almost nightly ritual out in the villages, but it doesn't happen so much in the towns; or, if it does, it's rather hidden). I'd got chatting with this gaggle of local ne'er-do-wells in a bar about this, and they had invited me to join them for an impromptu kava session out on the street. Three of them were harmless old soaks, but there was a younger hanger-on who had a disturbing psychotic intensity about him. When I noticed that he was carrying a monkey-wrench wrapped up in a plastic carrier bag, I decided to bug out of there before I got myself mugged.

Could you organise a piss-up in a brewery?

Ah, that's a rather unfair idiom. In fact, organising a piss-up in a brewery is HARD, because it's a place of work; and although there's beer all around you, very often there's nary a drop of it available to drink. The Yanjing Brewery in Beijing has a very comfortably appointed bar (a bit too comfy for my taste: rather like the UK's dreaded 'saloon bars' - all beige carpet and upholstered seats) at the end of its visitors' tour. I have often thought of dragging the lads out there for a session.... Hmm, now there's an idea.

What's your favourite place to go drinking?

In Beijing, of course, it is well documented that I spend most of my leisure hours in the most excellent 12 Square Metres bar... and/or at (my older, and rather deeper love) The Pool Bar. However, my absolute favourite place to drink in Beijing is any grotty streetside restaurant where you can keep ordering chuanr and 3-kuai beers until 3am or 4am.

Be careful what you order!

In the tropics, especially the Caribbean, you drink rum. This is a given. And it’s too darned hot to drink spirits neat, so you have to mix them. Pina coladas and other such fruity rum cocktails are very pleasant, but a chap can rarely order such a thing without aspersions being cast on his manhood. Thus, a rum and Coke is what a man mostly drinks in the tropics. How hard can that be?

Well, in Jamaica it is a minefield. The default rum option invariably seems to be Wray & Nephew’s Overproof White Rum, which is a rather too robustly alcoholic at nearly 63% (and I think it used to be even stronger when I first visited the island twenty years ago). And it tastes of toilets. That’s putting it kindly: it tastes like something you shouldn’t even pick up without putting protective gloves on first. The smell is even worse than the taste: sniff too deeply and your eyes will water, your nostrils will pucker, you may even gag. This stuff is, I believe, quite literally emetic. A chemist friend who also tried this appalling distillation some years ago assures me that he recognised the distinctive whiff of pyridine about it – a chemical commonly added to things like methylated spirit to try to ensure that you’ll throw up before you can imbibe a fatal amount of the stuff.

This overpowering chemical tang cannot be disguised or diluted. Trying to dilute this rum is a big mistake: it seems somehow able to propagate its poison, to make any mixer taste completely of its own chemical nastiness. You can pour a half-litre of Coke into a single shot of this vile drink, and the nauseating stench will still assault your nostrils every bit as savagely. The more mixer you add, the more foul-tasting fluid you have in your glass to try and drink. If you inadvertently order a Rum and Coke in Jamaica, you are almost certainly going to end up with a Wray & Nephew’s and Coke – that is, a highball glass of carbonated bleach.

The locals, it seems, have developed an immunity to the dubious chemical additives in their homeland’s flagship “rum”. Or they’re prepared to ignore its disgusting taste because it delivers such bang-for-the-buck in alcohol content. Or perhaps they just like messing with tourists. Come to think of it, I don’t believe I ever saw a single Jamaican drink any of this stuff.

No, no, they drink a much more palatable variety of rum. The leading rum producer on the island is the Appleton Estate sugar plantation, and their Special Dark Rum is the tipple of choice for most Jamaicans. It’s not particularly dark; neither dark, nor light, an amber, caramelly colour. And it’s not particularly complex in flavour; it lacks any of those rich notes of cinnamon or cardamom or vanilla that you get in some of the Caribbean’s more exotic rums. But it’s very palatable, slides down easy. Goes nicely with Coke.

'State Special and Coke  is what you order in Jamaica – if you want a refreshing mixed drink, rather than a Dr Jekyll beaker of foaming toxins.

[I've long been meaning to write more about my first trip to Jamaica - my first exotic overseas journey, right after I finished university - but keep failing to get around to it. The other week, I happened to discover that I still had this piece on my computer, something I submitted several years ago to a - now defunct - Caribbean travel website. I'm not sure if Wray & Nephew's White Rum is still as awful as this.  It has been many, many years since I last tried it. The Appleton Estate has subsequently taken over the brand, and they have been ramping up their efforts to market it around the world over the last decade or so.]

Is it really that easy?

I was intrigued to find this locally-produced brand of 'whisky' in a convenience store in Kuala Lumpur when I visited there a month or so back: beguilingly - suspiciously - cheap, at just 8.90 ringgit for 250ml.

The ingredients are listed as: Alcohol. Whiski. Air. Water.

Air???

Well, it's nice to see whisky - or 'whiski' - getting a look-in. I do like my whisky to contain some whisky. Unlike in China, where the dangerous knock-off stuff we are so often fobbed off with is generally concocted from baijiu and caramel. Well, baijiu sometimes - if you're lucky. Quite often, it's crudely manufactured raw ethanol (or methanol!), with lots of nasty chemical impurities in it.

This stuff, though, with its reassuring hint of 'whiski', I thought would be probably unpleasant but broadly 'safe'. I rather regret not having got around to trying it.

A wish to build a dream on

The former Nam Wah Hotel (on Lebuh Chulia in Georgetown, Penang, Malaysia - just a few yards from the bar where I spent most of my evenings in Penang) is - and evidently has been for some while - most emphatically up for sale. I don't think you can see them all in this picture, not at this resolution, but, as I recall, there were something like 15 different real estate agents splashing their contact details on the front of the property.

It's a charming little house - although in need of a spot of work. Quite a decent location too, in the quaint historic district up in the north-east of the island, where most of the tourist hotels and backpacker dives are.

However, it does suffer the challenge of being a divided space - how can you make a bar work over two separate floors?? And I reflect that even budget drinking den, the Monaliza Café, just a couple of doors along, was not exactly doing a roaring trade (typically - one elderly, teetotal expat, two or three locals [friends of the boss], myself, and three or four other random tourists: half a dozen or so not-particularly-high-spending punters per night is scarcely going to cover the overheads). No, there's probably a good reason why its previous owners failed to make a successful business of this place, and why it's now been so long derelict.

But a man can dream, a man can dream.....

Legacy of Empire

At the end of last month, I briefly visited the picturesque island of Penang in Malaysia. In the north-east corner of the island, in the heart of the old colonial settlement of Georgetown, you find Fort Cornwallis, the seat of British administration, founded in the 1780s by Capt. Francis Light of the British East India Company. A century later, a lighthouse was added to the compound.... along with a yard-arm.

What possible purpose can this structure have served (the yard-arm, that is; we can assume that the lighthouse was erected for the sake of mariners' safety)... other than to indicate when it would be decent to imbibe the first gin & tonic of the day?

A private joke

My friend Ruby was very excited to find this brand of baked goods in a 7/11 store in the Bukit Bintang area of Kuala Lumpur the other week.... though they were not exactly the 'Fluffy Buns' she would have hoped to get her hands on.

What I was doing two weeks ago today (8)

After 8 full days in a place, and with the flight home starting to loom... the appetite for exploration and sightseeing dwindles... and you just want to sit at a pavement table in front of one of the ubiquitous 'food court'-type open restaurants, idling away your remaining hours, trying to pump beer-fluids into your system as quickly as the tropical heat sweats them out of you.

My Beijing drinking pal Ruby, who'd joined me for this second weekend, had spotted a little Chinese place (well, it had a Chinese menu, but the staff all seemed to be Malays) on a sidestreet just off Chinatown's main street market strip of Jln. Petaling which was advertising - narrowly - the cheapest beers we could find anywhere in the city: 14 ringgit for big bottles of Tiger, and a 'special offer' of only 13 ringgit on a brand I'd never heard of before, Anchor (a slightly darker style than the typical lagers down there, but not very engaging; no idea who makes it - it doesn't seem to have anything to do with San Francisco's famous 'Anchor Steam Beer').  We spent much of the afternoon getting mildly toasted there - and occasionally trying out snacky options like their satay and their salt & pepper pork ribs (although we passed up their intriguing/horrifying 'marmite spare ribs'!).

Fine times.

[For a city where the Chinese-descended population forms the largest ethnic segment - well over 40% - KL has a surprisingly tiny 'Chinatown', only one small block. I imagine the reason is that the Chinese were always so numerous here that they were never ghettoized, but are widely distributed throughout the city - and the 'Chinatown' district may be quite a recent development, perhaps cynically targeted at tourists. The 'Little India', focused on the Masjid Jamek mosque and a number of small Hindu temples, feels like a much more authentic community.]

What I was doing two weeks ago today (7)

Stumbling upon the Coliseum Café & Hotel in Kuala Lumpur, and gambling on it as a quick dinner option.

There is a curious shortage (complete absence?!) of Indian restaurants in the city's Little India district. I could have made do with the snack options in the teeming street market along Jln. Masjid India, but my companion wasn't keen on that because of the sultry early evening heat. We searched for some air-conditioned respite, and the Coliseum seemed to be our only option.

What a serendipitous find! I would have liked to spend more time there (but we had a gig to go to that evening)... because it was the only proper bar I came upon in Malaysia: dark wood, frosted windows, a trio of 'regulars' propped on stools at the bar. It felt like a remnant of the bygone colonial era - but somewhat down-at-heel, more of a working class hangout than a genteel club for the administrators and rubber planters; it had that combination of spaciousness and tattiness that you tend to find in railway station bars back home. (The following day, I found an in many ways uncannily similar - though far swankier - bar on Merdeka Square, the centre of the old colonial administration [next to the cricket square - ah, British imperialism!]. That place - resolutely nameless - was, unsurprisingly, a top-dollar members-only club, and I wasn't able to blag my way in. Though the view over the veranda on to the cricket pitch was quite captivating, I think, on the whole, that the seedy charm of joints like the Coliseum is really more my kind of thing.)

Time, alas, was very tight, so we weren't able to soak up the musty ambience of this improbable bar. I didn't even get a chance to check out the prices. Instead, we repaired to the restaurant section next door in hopes of getting a quick meal. In general, you shouldn't expect the slickest of service at a place that greets you with a 'Help Wanted' sign (crudely hand-written, sun-faded) on the door. And we found that the 'head waiter' (the only waiter) here was an elderly Chinese man with a bad hip. Fortunately, only three other tables in the large dining room were occupied (and one of these had already finished eating), but it did seem rather unlikely that this poor chap was going to be able to make it all the way from the kitchen to our table to take our order, return to the kitchen with it, and bring us our food - in the 30 or 40 minutes we had available. Inefficient side-trips to find us another menu and fetch a pitcher of beer from the bar (we had tried to get one ourselves at the bar, but the barman was insistent that the waiter would handle all orders for the restaurant) appeared to be jeopardising our schedule still further. It was quite painful to watch the old man shuffling up and down the length of the room in ultra-slow motion: it made the distance of 20 yds or so to the kitchen door seem far more. (And it was an exquisite torture for my friend - über-groupie Ruby, obsessively anxious that she was going to be late for the 'Battle of the Bands' show and miss her beloved AIS playing.) Service out of the kitchen, however, was extremely quick. And even the doddering old waiter seemed to have an uncanny power of occasional briskness (his progress was only creakily slow when you were watching him; if you switched your attention elsewhere, he could materialise at your tableside in seconds - I really don't know how he did that!). So, we were able to make the gig in plenty of time.

I was sorry to leave the Coliseum Café so soon, though. Odd how my tastes work - but the Coliseum was the one thing in KL that I would go back for.

[I have attempted to add a couple of photos to this post; but they won't display, because Blogger's picture upload tool has been screwed all week. Bloody Blogger!

A problem I finally 'fixed' by reverting to the old 'compose' interface. Grrrrr.]

A new category tag

The harsher critics amongst you might have been inclined to object that my little drinking blog here hasn't really lived up to its name.

Where is the variety, where the international scope, where the restless wanderlust we had been led to expect?  they may carp.

Yes, indeed, quite so; it would be a reasonable complaint.

For the past eight-and-a-half years, I have rarely set foot outside of China. Indeed, I have rarely set foot outside of Beijing. Loyal aficionados of the blog will recognise that I have in fact seldom set foot outside of the 5 or 6 bars I find tolerable in this city, almost all of which are within a convenient staggering distance of my apartment.

And when I have ventured overseas - or delved back into the nostalgia archives - it has almost invariably been to reminisce about bars in the UK or the USA. Never anywhere terribly exotic.

Well, apart from a whistlestop visit to North Korea, a school trip to Crete 20 years ago (as a teacher, not a pupil!), a romantic trauma in Dublin, and an excursion to Jamaica with my friend The Mothman at the end of my undergraduate days, that is. Such has been the feeble limit of my booze-fuelled globetrotting on here thus far.

However, my recent splurge of posts about Malaysia got me to thinking that this might be a good time to create a new 'label' for posts about my drinking experiences other than in the UK, the US, and China: Around the world.

There'll probably be a few more Malaysia posts to be added to it over the coming week or so.  And I have some good stories about Fiji that I've somehow never yet got around to recording on here.  And then.... Hmm, and then I might have to go on a holiday again, to garner more material.