The Unencumbered (Night)Life

I've come to the conclusion that Canada has one of the worst bar scenes in the world.

Admittedly, I haven't been out as much in Sierra Leone as I tended to be back home. This likely stems from a combination of my frequent exhaustion and the natural shyness that I often lay claim to (though my friends never seem to buy it). But this weekend nicely hammered home the point that SL's bar scene trumps that of my native land.

On Friday, we went to one of the city's ritziest restaurants, a place called Mamba Point, for a surprise birthday shindig ABJ had organized for his girlfriend, Jane. When talk turned to going out, I bowed out due to the above-mentioned exhaustion and was asleep before midnight. But I told ABJane (an affectionate hybrid name coined for the couple) that I would celebrate with them the following night.

It was with this in mind that I swung into Freetown Supermarket yesterday and picked up the kitschiest alcoholic concoction I could find: Safari.


An "exotic fruit flavoured liquer" that blends mango, papaya, maracuya and wild lime, Safari bills itself as "The Taste of Adventure." Hilarious and chock full of African cliche, it was impossible to pass up (though I was tempted to indulge in the upper-crust cognacs, Courvoisier and Hennessey).

I mixed it with an orange-lemon-pineapple fruit blend, joking that these drinks would be enough to cover my fruit intake for the remainder of my time abroad, and was ready for a night on the town.

For me, the first endearing feature of the Salone bar scene is that it caters to a nighthawk crowd, a fact I couldn't possibly be more comfortable with. The second is that beers cost $2, though the JD and Coke I started the night with carried a heftier $5 price tag.

Yesterday, knowing ABJ wouldn't leave home until at least midnight, Kevin and I arrived at The Atlantic, a bar along Lumley Beach, around 10:45. It was still pretty dead.

The first time I went to China House, one of the few places in town where you can see live music (though the performers are cordoned off in a small secondary room of the bar for no apparent reason), we drank on a nearby sidewalk for an hour beforehand because Elvis, the JHR country director, assured us it was too early to make an appearance.

But Sierra Leoneans make up for their late starts to the evening with even later finishes. Kevin and I migrated to Paddy's, the country's most famous bar and the one featured in Blood Diamond, around 2:00.

Kevin left at 3:15, an early finish for him after lasting until 5:30 last weekend. ABJ and Jane departed about an hour later. I finally tapped out just before 6 a.m. with my friend Britel, the DJ I met at my beloved Senegalese restaurant. By that point, the crowd had started to thin out but the club was by no means empty.

You see, Paddy's doesn't close. There is no last call. And I think North American bars ought to be taking notes.

The fact of the matter is that people who want to drink past 2 a.m. are going to find a way. Trying to regulate the acceptable times for drinking only encourages more excessive consumption.

I can't count the number of times I've bolted to the bar at Phil's Grandson's in Waterloo to get two more drinks at last call, hoping they'd be enough to shake off the stubborn inhibitions that so often keep me off the dance floor. And when we're ultimately herded out of that dingy basement or one of Waterloo's other fine establishments, my Cord friends and I generally just wandered to Joe's apartment or Carlson's house, where alcohol was never in short supply.

With friends like these, I can drink just as late at home; the only difference is that there's a spike in the rate of consumption around that 2 a.m. last call that wreaks havoc on a man's efficacy on the day of the Sabbath. Though I wouldn't classify today as a paragon of productivity, owing largely to the volume of Star beer Britel was directing my way last night, I got considerably more done than many a Sunday back home.

Canada and the States are among the few countries I've heard of where cities like Halifax and NYC that have after-hours clubs are the exception to the rule. Here, Europeans and Sierra Leoneans alike look at me with a mix of pity and confusion when I speak of the 2 a.m. closing times back home. By all accounts, most parts of Asia possess similarly free-wheelin' bar scenes. I imagine Australia is the same.

I think our status as the outlier on this issue is merely a manifestation of the hyper-rigidity that characterizes North America in general. Regulation is our saviour.

People are suffering debilitating head injuries in cycling accidents? No problem. Just pass a law to protect the minds that are functioning so poorly as to make no effort at protecting themselves, to borrow an example from Jerry Seinfeld's hilarious "I'm Telling You For The Last Time" routine.

Overall, my Salone experience has been a refreshing immersion in a culture of people that don't spend the majority of their waking hours in paranoid contemplation of their own impending doom. They don't allow worries about death to get in the way of actually living.

This is a land where, if you want to spend every day of your life hurdling down the Makeni-Freetown highway at 80 km/hr on the roof of rickety poda-poda, you just go right ahead. You'll probably die in a horrific accident before your 40th birthday, but there's something appealing about having the freedom to take that risk. It's as if you're treated as an intelligent human being, capable of making decisions about your own safety. A novel concept, to be sure.

Of course, I'm not advocating a complete abandonment of rules and enforcement of the law. There's a reason - many, actually - Canadians enjoy a life expectancy nearly twice that of Sierra Leoneans. But I do think a healthier middle ground could be struck. In fact, I think it's called Europe.

That said, the Salone nightlife is hardly perfect. Clubs like Paddy's are literally teeming with prostitutes and, in an unexpected development, I'm finding it wearisome to have legions of gorgeous young women fix their eyes firmly on mine and assert bluntly, "I want you." Presumably only because I know the phrase "for your money" is the implied ending to the statement, though.

Salone's club scene has also been unable to find a solution to that tedious global blight of awkward white guys that can't dance. Although reviews of my dancing were uniformly positive the one time I hit the dance floor since I've been here, my hope that anonymity in a foreign land would shed my dance floor inhibitions has proven to be wishful thinking. Much like my tendency towards lengthy work days, I think I'll have to file this one under the heading of 'Things I can't change by simply crossing the Atlantic'.