ex·o·dus n.
1. A departure of a large number of people.
Something happened on Easter Friday night. Something terrible. Something terribly un-Australian.
As people across Sydney were enjoying a Good Friday – and in some cases a Great Friday – they got sent home.
It's probably safe to say that 99.5% of us out here drink. The lot of us are usually down for a bourbon, beer, or something else, and being a religious day, Easter Good Friday seems like the perfect night to shout someone a drink.
Hey Jesus, it's my shout!
But then something awful happened as 10 pm neared on Good Friday-night…
People – otherwise happy people, happy from excess pre-Easter chocolate, liquor, and a nice long weekend – got evicted from their drinking holes.
Across Sydney bars closed up, clubs said piss off, and everyone shut their doors while people still had drinks in their hands.
I was at The Three Monkeys on George St. with new friends Louise & Ash and we saw it from a somewhat managed view.
About 10-15 minutes prior to the closing, we had bought drinks and then made our way up stairs while we looked for somewhere to sit, chat, do the whole pub thing.
We got to the third and top floor where pretty young things and guys with ugly pastel-coloured shirts were making awkward body movements as if parts of their arses were falling off to a bunch of loud music under the glare of black lights with the occasional strobe flash. And about thirty seconds in when we figured it was a bit too noisy up here and we should try the second floor again, the lights on this top floor reset back to the crappy tungsten glow that said "the end is here".
More or less, it meant "fuck off; the club is closed."
The jams stopped pumping and we could hear complaints as people were ushered out. We found somewhere to sit on the second floor but that then started to clear out too. We tried taking advantage of the now uncrowded bar and relaxed for a second until management's people forced us down the stairs into the ground floor like everyone else had with drinks in our hands.
That lasted all of two minutes.
"Time to go," one of the guards shouted as people were forced from their Easter drinks and removed from the pub.
Including us.
I know The Three Monkeys were following some severely stupid law, but the least they could have done was stop themselves from being greedy and selling drinks that we couldn't finish. Hell, they could have warned us that the bar hadn't long to go. It takes at half an hour – at least! – to have a beer and here they were serving beer until people were literally kicked out.
Further:
What sort of fucked up law suggests pubs in Australia close at 10 on Good Friday?
We're adults. We drink. We make decisions. We choose to drink when we want to.
And it is un-Australian to have a law removing those who worship the drink from their house of worship.
As Ash, Louise, and myself left, I said to them that had there been a Jewish pub, we should all go there. There isn't, or none so far as I know anyway.
So as pubs & clubs closed for the night, along came the Exodus: an almost biblical movement of adults looking for somewhere to go now that everything had shut all of a sudden.
Ash, Louise, and my hatted-self made our way to the park where the bitter cold wound its way around our necks and ears while it worked out when to sink its teeth into whatever flesh it could find.
We shot noisy pictures on my bloody awful two megapixel phone camera while we laughed, chatted, and the two girls stretched from their long day at the job.
Some of the noisy photos from the Nokia 6110 at night with Ash…
…and Louise. Yes, it's such a great night camera heap of crap.
And then knowing Ash and I were both headed in practically the same direction, we left left Louise with some of her friends (after I'd bought them both some much needed chocolate :P) and eventually, eventually, eventually found a cab to take us home. Ash and I exchanged numbers and then the cabbie drove me home.
And remember the comment I made a few paragraphs ago about the Jewish pub?
As Ash, Louise, and myself left, I said to them that had there been a Jewish pub, we should all go there.
Well, the Jewish cabbie agreed too. And he's not the only one… :)
Exodus definition source:
exodus. (n.d.). The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition.
Retrieved March 26, 2008, from Dictionary.com website: http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/exodus