I do not like this, sam I am

So this was an all-around shitty day, although I had the pleasure of seeing Janine, a friend from Berlin, for her birthday—the one ray of fun in the whole evening.

I started out the day by waking up later than I had wanted and feeling sluggish. I tried to get some work done, but my brain just didn’t want to kick in. I had very little to eat at my place, and so I ended up walking to the Alimentation Générale across the street and buying junk food, which had the unsurprising effect of making me more sluggish. All in all, I didn’t get much done.

Then I went out to see Janine for her birthday at an “English”-style pub near Etienne-Marcel, stopping by Le Pin Up to say hi to Fantômette as she kicked this latest edition of her monthly residency. Drinks with Janine were great, although I spent less time talking to the birthday girl herself (who was obviously in demand) and more time talking with a friend of hers from Lille, who was really sweet.

Near closing time at the pub (2h00), we settled up the bill only to find that there were three unclaimed pints. We did the math and figured out that it was probably a couple that had left much earlier, which didn’t leave Janine very happy, as she ended up covering the remaining pints.

From there, we headed over to Le Pin Up, where things started going downhill. While Janine was upstairs getting shots, I ordered a round of “Bubble Le Pin Up” drinks, which were a mixture of vodka, champagne, tons of ice (too much, in my opinon) and flavoured syrup. I ordered them with violet syrup, which is sort of the trademark drink of Le Pin Up, but when the drinks were poured, the drinks had a pink hue rather than a lavender one.

I asked the server if he had put the right syrup in the drinks, and he got very defensive and snippy. I tasted one and said that it tasted like raspberry, and got more aggressive and snarky, insisting that he hadn’t made an error, taking out the bottle of violet syrup and waving it in front of my face, and implying that I was too drunk to tell the difference.

Janine was here trying to celebrate her birthday and Fantômette was concentrating on her DJ so I decided to do the very French shoulder-shrug “whatever” gesture and not complain about it to either of the girls. Nonetheless, I’ll have to tell Fantô about it sooner or later, because I’m not paying 12€ per glass for shitty service in a painted-over root cellar. There are plenty of places in Paris for me to pay 100% too much for watered-down drinks, and many of them employ servers that are at least civil. Thus begins the LuisInParis boycott of Le Pin Up.

I had to make it over to On Cherche Encore… before the end of the night to say hellp to PanPan and Aclank, since the former was celebrating his birthday, but that I was held up by the fact that I discovered my cell phone to be missing. I searched everywhere around where I had put my belongings, and I didn’t see it anywhere. I distinctly remembered pulling out the phone to check the time at the pub around midnight, so the only other place it could be was the pub. Janine (bless her soul) walked over with me to the pub and helped me knock on the window, where we were able to get the attention of the staff as they were closing up shop. They insisted that they couldn’t find the phone anywhere, so I had to continue with my night with possibility of me having lost my phone (and all of my contact information with it).

I biked over to On Cherche Encore at top speed, but when I got there it was already the end of the night and both DJs had stopped spinning. I tried to ask if they were still serving drinks at the bar—I could really use one at this point—but the guy at the bar was apparently the second asshole bartender of the night, brushing me off dismissively before I could even say anything.

Again, I chose to pretend that I was in a good mood while I made small talk with my friends and bade them goodbye (and I was certainly happy to see them, so I didn’t want to give them any other impression), but I soon found the performance tiring and headed home, hoping tomorrow would be a fresh start.