El Neagra:
Against my better judgement I ended up heading out to Pub 18 with Ovidiu and Maria (his wife) last night. We arrived late, around 9pm - we were suppossed to be there at 8pm - so we got some really shitty seats. One of the band members was late coming in from the countryside, so things didn’t start until 10pm anyway. The place wasn’t too smoke-filled when we arrived, but worsened as the evening wore on: Maria’s eyes were stinging by the time the band started.
El Neagra should probably be described as reggae - not really me thing. The lead singer was pretty decent though, and the girls dancing on the tables for free shots of tequila more than made up for my lack of interest in the group’s style. Service sucked, we only managed to get one round of Cuba Libres (rum & coke) before the band started, and had to wait until the interval to order a bottle of wine.
Things finished up at midnight, kind of early for my tastes, but then it was probably better that I didn’t spend too much time in there breathing in all that smoke when my cold isn’t totally gone yet. Driving home wasn’t too bad, the streets aren’t covered with 10cm of ice as they have been every other winter I’ve spent in Romania. The mist coming off the lake near my house at around 1am was incredible - thick as pea soup - impossible to see the lights of the car in front of us on the bridge between two sections of the lake.
