Shoulder to shoulder

My last 24 hours in Goa were pretty funny...

I started talking with a few people while I was eating dinner, and came away meeting this guy, Anthony, from London (I've been meeting lots of Londoner). He supposedly is a musician, although I suspect he has a day job too...He had JUST landed in Goa and was excited to get drunk and meet girls...the only problem is Benaulim beach, while excellent, isn't girls gone wild; like he was wishing. I tried, in vain, to explain that if he wanted huge parties he needed to head to other beaches, so finally we went down to the beach together so I could show him as opposed to keep wasting my breath. Some of the guys who worked at Domincks were lighting fireworks when we got down to the beach...and being guys we were naturally drawn to the loud explosions...like moths to light.

These looked like Black Cat fireworks...the sounded like Black Cat fireworks...but with one essential (and just so Indian) difference. The fireworks back home have the nice slow-burning green wicks--but in typical Indian fashion the wicks were more akin to cotton strings sticking up....

So, you light the wick & wait. You're supposed to wait till the cotton burns off and it stats to 'fizzle' at which point you throw them in the air...pop pop pop...they blow up. Anthony almost manages to blow his hand off a few times. I mean, when the Indian kids are YELLING at you that it's time to throw them...u know it's pretty much too late. lol. A few burns later he and I retied off to a cafe to play pool and let his charred hands recover a bit. And thats when we started taking whiskey shots. By the end of the night I swear they were serving us shots in what looked like tiny glass flower pots, or maybe they were beakers. Either way, it was the strangest container I've ever been served in. Oh yeah, when we started drinking....our first shot, he looks over at me and mumbles something about "an American and a Brit, shoulder to shoulder." And that became our toast...

So by the end of the night I'm beyond wasted and I turn around and he's trying to talk to this Russian woman sitting there. His Russian is nill, her English is okay but she starts talking in Spanish instead- go figure- somehow (mostly through alcohol) they hit it off and as I was walking back home the two of them were dancing in circles at the edge of the surf taking their clothes off....

It turns out she was married, first oops, and definitely over 50. The next afternoon when I saw him about 3:30 "well, cross that one off me list" he says. Anyway, after that we rode around on his scooter and just sort of got lost in Goa....Although it turned into a problem when it got dark and we were REALLY lost and I had a bus to catch that night. U can ask people for directions...But it won't do much good. For instance, you point down the road and ask "Benaulim? Is Benaulim this way?" More than likely someone will say "yes" and point down the road the same way you're pointing...And you come to find out later it was exactly the OPPOSITE way of where it is you needed to be going.

Cheers! Shoulder to shoulder, mate.