It’s amazing the difference a week makes….let’s backtrack…just over a week ago PAX’s bar was barely bar-ish, and having a drink down there kind of felt like hanging out in someone’s garage, actually that probably explains why the place was like a fortress of solitude…those were sadder days at PAX. So how did our grungy (and not the charming kind of grungy) garage-like bar turn it around to become a place that is already well on it’s way to becoming a part of hostel folklore and a featured location in the memories (however blurry they may be) of passengers and staff alike?

Perhaps we can put it down to a few different things.

The purchase of a reliable fridge has surely been helpful, though we were not sure how useful our fridge full of beer was without anyone to  serve them or reply to the requests of “Please sir may I have another?”  and then Trent showed up on our doorstop and within hours became the resident barman.  So we had the fridge and the barman and the bar was starting to see a bit of activity.

Next we got a deck of cards and things started out innocently enough with a friendly hand of ‘yanef’ or ‘rummy’ here and then escalated into a full scale tournament of drinking games, which saw Kaylee sustain an injury to the hand from an over competitive player, who shall remain nameless, and many injuries to the pride and dignity of both the passengers and staff who found themselves mounted on the bar giving impressions of animals. Perhaps none of these impressions was more convincing than Val’s cat impression; we have our suspicions that this wasn’t his first experience of pretending to clean himself with his own saliva or arching his back just so.

We also have to give an honourable mention to Niall for his ape impression; his performance consisting of the phrase “I’m an ape” was inspired. Next came the lights, we replaced our crude fluorescents (not the most flattering of lights even through the thick lenses of beer goggles) with some softer mood lighting and suddenly the whole bar and the people in it started to look much more attractive.

Following the addition of our more forgiving lighting our bar was buzzing with passengers, and our dance floor was christened by Chook and the General in an interesting interpretive choreographic piece that had the General on all fours acting as the proud steed to Chook’s cowgirl moves. Next to be persuaded onto the dance floor, well you could hardly call it persuasion as his arm really didn’t need twisting at all, was Chris (or ‘Turtle’ as he is now known around the hostel due to his slow paced performance in speed related card games) who kind of just rolled around on the floor a lot, but it was a good effort. PAX’s bar, the legend begins…

Snowbie

PS. Check out some videos of the described antics on PAX’s facebook page.

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