Eastern Exploration

Going out in Hiroshima

Anja and I were thirsting to check out the nightlife, and we’d seen how many people were out the previous night when we went looking for dinner. We went out exploring in the section of town conveniently marked on the map as the “club district,” hoping for some dance music but without any particular idea what we’d find. The people on the street were great fun to look at. One guy was dressed as an old-school Brit-punk, complete with a thick red mohawk, and hailed Anja as a fellow wearer-of-oddball-fashion. She got another smile out of a girl who was dressed in similar Goth Lolita style. We saw a ton of signs on the street for places with fanciful names that sounded a lot like bars or clubs, but they’d often be a few floors up and eight or ten to a building. When we went upstairs to take a look, they turned out to be itty bitty little bars that each had their own theme. You couldn’t pack more than 20 bodies into one of these places, with comfortable seating for six or eight, and they were invariably being used by clique or four or six people all drinking as a group. Often they’d be singing karaoke. I really didn’t want to intrude, and we both really wanted to find someplace to dance, so we kept looking. Walking further down the street, we were drawn upstairs again by a throbbing bassline, and zeroed in on a door. Five feet away, we could tell it was a solid electronic rhythm and looked at each other with a smile. Opening the door, the smiles turned into silly grins: we had just stumbled on a psytrance club. There was a little bar, a little lounge area and a little dancefloor with a light crowd. The DJs we heard over the next few hours were excellent, and we had a great time dancing. The crowd stayed light, so later on we went back to exploring the streets and poking our heads in other people’s parties in search a good bar. Eventually we found exactly what we were looking for: a “Sex Pistols” themed spot with four punkishly-dressed bartenders, two girls chatting with them at the bar, a karaoke machine and “Team America: World Police” playing on ten screens. Nobody there spoke much English, but they did their best, and we got a lot of laughs out of commenting on the movie. Three karaoke songs later, we called it a night and caught a taxi home.

posted by Noah Flower @ 1:22 PM