For the first time in quite a while, I went abroad last week. Allegedly a business trip, my boss (who I get on well with) and I went to a 3-day conference about a technology we use massively throughout our working days.
If you know anything about serious geeks, you’ll be unsurprised to hear that the most useful parts of the entire event happened in the evening when we’d all gone to one of the many bars in the capital city.
The city in question was Riga, the capital of Latvia. A fantastic place, well worth a visit if you ever get the chance. One thing that struck us both was that Latvian girls are gorgeous. All of them. Seriously, there were more pretty girls walking down the street in Latvia than I saw in Hollywood. It was quite amazing.
I think I’m going to need to give my boss a name, so let’s go with.. Smiler. We get on well because we have quite a bit in common – We go rock climbing most weeks, we both scuba dive, both have similar working habits, etc.
So. Despite Smiler’s best efforts, I didn’t get drunk whilst out there – and when you’re being handed glasses with four shots of rum in, that can take some doing. But I don’t like being anything more than a little tipsy, so I stayed that way. And for the most part, I went to bed at a fairly sensible time – before midnight, at least – and was awake enough to get a lot out of the conference talks and so forth.
On the last night, however, I was kind of out of excuses – didn’t have to be up for anything other than our flight the next day; didn’t have any money worries, we were on an expense account; and to be honest it’s been too long since I just went out for a laugh & a night on the town.
So I said to hell with it and joined Smiler and a few other conference attendees on a tour of the nightlife. He almost got sidetracked by a waitress at the bar we met everybody at (He’s an incorrigible flirt, even though he has a girlfriend) but ultimately took the barman’s advice of where we could find somewhere to have some fun and we moved onto a club a few streets away.
I haven’t been clubbing in.. god.. the best part of a decade. And I was never really all that comfortable with it – Everybody else seemed to know what they were doing, whilst I felt like I was faking it the whole time.
So I was quite happy to grab a drink and a seat and just take a look around for a few minutes. It was early enough that the dance floor was fairly clear – there was one young lady who was clearly in her element dancing with a male friend, a few people half-standing and half-bopping to the music, and that was about it.
Smiler had noted on one of his previous nights out that there weren’t many men interested in dancing in Riga, so suggested that we just hit the dance floor and we’d soon be joined by some of the girls around the edge. I confess I was the last by some way to go out onto the floor.
But then I thought about it a little. I’d not had any exercise in a few days, not even my usual daily run; I’d spent so much time sitting in talks that my shoulders were complaining; and to hell with it, I might be out of practice but I DO know how to dance.
So I finished my drink and went onto the floor. And I just stopped worrying and to be honest I was moving more to stretch out the knots in my back than to look good. But it felt good and we were having fun, I really didn’t much care about anything else.
So I was a little surprised when the pretty lady who’d been dancing earlier asked me if I wanted to dance with her. It came completely out of the blue, at least as far as I was concerned. But hey, pretty girl wants to dance, you can’t really say no..
Given that I’d seen her earlier and knew she was a great dancer, I was a little surprised when she complimented me on my dancing. Possibly the fact that I mixed in a few jive moves had something to do with it. Or possibly it was the way that we were both being very flirty, albeit in a very innocent way. Nothing anyone could object to.
Well.. It’s possible I did discover firsthand that she had a very firm bottom.. but that was it.
We chatted a bit, danced for a while, then one of her friends – an irish guy, it seemed – came over and gave her a very good-humoured telling-off for dancing with a stranger. He called me several very unflattering names, I grinned and said something like “I like you too!”, they both laughed and headed off the stage.
A little while later, one of the other men in her little party came over to have a more serious quiet word with me, of the “That’s my girl, hands off, pal” variety. Which I again shrugged off – I’d already said I was leaving the country next day, and hell, she was the one had asked ME to dance.
And so the night went on, and then a little later we bumped into each other again and she asked for another dance. To which I obliged. My comment that her boyfriend wouldn’t be very happy about it lead to the not-entirely-unexpected “I don’t have a boyfriend” reply. I warned her lightheartedly that if I got beaten up outside I would blame her entirely, and we left it pretty much at that. (We might be geeky programmers, but Smiler’s a black belt and I’ve done a couple of martial arts in my time too, in addition to being substantially bigger than anyone else in the club – I could afford to be fairly relaxed even without her assurance that everyone was friendly. They were – the worst I got were some envious looks. At one point she asked if I was making my boss angry by dancing with her, and I gave the honest answer of “Not really, he’s just jealous”)
Eventually the night was over and at around 3am we headed home. It had definitely been a fun night, unexpectedly so – I’d forgotten what a rarity it is to be a man who can dance without being a showoff; and an even bigger rarity it is to be a man who’s evidently looking for nothing more than a bit of fun without anything more serious at the end than maybe a goodnight kiss (which I got!)
Where I live at the moment is a complete desert when it comes to having fun in the evenings. At some time over the next 6 months or so, a move to a place with more to offer is very definitely on the cards. I’m starting to think that I might do better out of such a move than I had previously imagined..
