Villa Gesell - the final moments

The last night in Villa Gesell Miro, Clau, Juan and I went out in search of "Gesell"'s one and only Irish pub. We found it, right at the end of the main street - but it was the least Irish Irish pub I had ever seen. There were "Budweiser" signs everywhere, the music was Latin American (which was great, but not particularly in keeping with the theme) and the Guinness was twice as expensive as all the other beer. We therefore proceeded to ignore the lack of Irishness and have a great time anyway. Juan's brother, Santiago, showed up later with a few more friends and we drank, chatted and played pool.

However, the staff at Hook's "Irish" pub were about to throw a massive big rock into our lake of tranquillity, and written on that rock in big, red, capital letters was the word KARAOKE. Now, anyone that knows me knows I love to sing, but a lesser known fact is that I can't stand singing in front of an attentive audience, particularly with a microphone (likely due to two specific microphone-related singing disasters in my youth, which I decline to go into here, for reasons of brevity and embarrassment). Thus I was presented with the same dilemma as always: indulge my love of singing and face potential disaster and a lifetime of cringeing at the memory, or remain seated and gaze longingly at all the people on the stage that didn't give a damn? Thankfully, I chose the former, and even more thankfully, it wasn't a disaster. In fact, everyone in the audience was probably admiring how well I was singing in English (little did they know I'm a native speaker). So brownie points to me for feeling the fear and doing it anyway.

All of us had a go at singing, all of us were pretty awful, but so were the other people in the bar. People who can actually sing don't have to do karaoke, they have recording contracts. (Sometimes even people who should be relegated to karaoke have recording contracts). After the bar staff finally took pity on the population of Villa Gesell and turned off the karaoke machine, we stayed and played pool until they kicked us out (about 06:00). We walked home in the morning light, Juan and I searching fruitlessly for an open hamburger joint, then straight to bed in preparation for a lo-o-o-o-ong car trip home.