Late Nights…

It was a long weekend.  Or perhaps a late weekend would be more accurate.  I ended up going to bed after 8am both Friday and Saturday night.  That never happened in Los Angeles.  Or, for that matter, anywhere else I have lived in North America.

I remember the first time I stayed up all night “partying” – it was in my second year of university and I was dating a girl who liked to go to raves.  So I spent 50 bucks on a ticket for a “rave” in a huge warehouse in Toronto and another 30 bucks on mushrooms and tried to have a good time.  It didn’t really work.  I just couldn’t figure out the appeal.  I don’t mind dancing but after 30 minutes I’m pretty much danced out, which left about 8.5 hours to figure out what to do with my non-dancing self.  I couldn’t really lose myself in the music because it just wasn’t that great.  You can’t talk to anyone because it is too fucking loud, and plus I didn’t feel like I had much in common with the people who were there and actually having the time of their life.  So I just tried to make it look like I was having fun while secretly tormenting myself by keeping an eye on the girl I was dating (it was tenuous) talk and dance with other guys.

In the morning when the bus pulled up to take us back to our university I felt so glad to be getting the hell out of there that I almost forgot what a rotten time I had had and managed to get roped into a few more raves before I broke up with the girl.  I don’t know if there is any moral to the story other than raves are not very good, but it seems like most of the planet has already wised up to the fact at this point.  Progress.

This past weekend involved zero raves, and also didn’t involve any real reasons to stay up until 8am.  But what seems to happen is that, here in Berlin, you end up doing multiple nights out wrapped up in one.  For example, Friday I went out to a movie in the evening and then back to my place for drinks with a friend.  At around 1:30am she left since she had to get up early for a tennis lesson.  If I was in LA now my night would already be effectively over.  But I was in Berlin and I had an invitation to a party where an acquaintance was DJing.  So I went.  I stayed there for about an hour until it got broken up by the police.  By now it was about 3:30, so I decided to do the sensible thing and and jump on my bike and point it homeward.  On the way home I passed numerous people whooping it up and so when I saw a sign for the Bang Bang club – which seemed to have ads all over town, and which I had never been to – I thought, why not, and parked my bike.  So by the time I was eating a chicken doner at 7am, I had had three separate nights out rolled into one.

I caught myself complaining about the closing time of bars in Los Angeles on numerous occasions while living there this past year.  And I do still agree with myself that it is slightly absurd that the government can essentially say “Fun’s over!”  I doubt our founding father’s (or yours, I was born in Canada) would have agreed with this governmental invasion of private life.  But.  As previously mentioned, I never had a weekend when I stayed up until 8am on consecutive nights while in Los Angeles.  And perhaps this is actually a good thing.  I am definitely not convinced of the fact – maybe New York has the right balance with their 4am last call – but I admit to the possibility.  Plus it allows for an illegal scene in LA which has that exciting illicit feel to it.

In any case, below is a video I made with Philip on a weekend where we went to bed early and got up to see who we might find strolling the streets between 8 and 10am.  It’s up to you to decide which side of the argument it supports.