Van Nights
We’re leaving Commercial Drive and its vegan restaurants, its urban farming and its hangovered youth, to stay a few days at a more central location. Our bikes feel light without the bags at the front, and we’re cruising down 12th Avenue, reaching top speed everytime we get to a traffic light which turns red automaticaly as we reach it.
We’re a little late, but Ajung doesn’t seem too angry with us. She lives in a quiet street on the edge of the gay area: Davie Village. She leads us up to her flat which she shares with two other Korean students. There’s definetly something asian about this flat, something to do with the bright blue, red and green plastic cups, the tiny bowls on the draining board, the laundry baskets which have mouths and eyes and look like anime characters. I’m glad we’re going to spend a few days with some Koreans here, because the different Asian communities are really part of Vancouver. It’s something you can’t not notice.
Tonight, Ajung is meeting up with her friends from university and going to a club. The bouncer gives me a series of very quickly executed pats as if he was showing me the basics of karate; his job really being to search my body for any weapons. I show my ID a second time, just so they are really sure I’m not 18 and I get inside. The club looks pretty clean and almost up-scale, but still Spag managed to get in with his hiking boots and his old hoody. I look around and realise that the few men I see are almost all badly dressed, some of them are even wearing baseball caps, like they’re here for a rap video clip. The chics have noticeably put more effort into their outfits, and whether the result is attractive or not is a different matter, but I can tell they’ve spent time to compose a look. There seem to be a huge amount of girls in here, and I’m told that it’s because it’s lady’s night, and that for another 15 minutes there’ll be boys parading naked on the dance floor. I walk further inside, and see the dance-floor and its half naked powder-eating paraders, surrounded by a swarm of excited females, shrieking at the top of their lungs, and I look away and sit at a table and for a moment I feel like I don’t really belong to the scene I’m in. I’m starting to get used to that feeling, being an outsider, being an English Alien, studying the mouvement from up above, something between a spy, a journalist and a tourist. We sit at a table and have a chat with Ajung’s friends who are from France, China, Mexico and Kazakstan. I don’t think I’ve ever met anyone from Kazakstan before, and for some stupid reason, I start talking about horse riding. She laughs at my cliché conversation topic, and I can’t really blame her, it’s like talking about the Eiffel Tower to a Frenchman.
The strippers have left now, and the club is filling up with new comers, young boys with over sized t-shirt and too much gel in their hair, indian girls wobbling on high heels, a few old men in checked shirts, eyes drating up and down young pairs of legs, saliving under over-grown moustaches. We invade the dance floor, and Spag does his usual dance which looks like he doesn’t know what to do with his long dangling arms. The DJ is going through all the usual rubbish, throwing in flavourless international hits one after the other. I guess he’s being as uninventive as I was when talking about Kazakstan…
Seb
Photos Spag
Partenaires / Facebook / latresgrandeboucle.com
