Ladies Night at Frida's

(Event occured on May 18, 2005. Dedicated to Bro. Patrick)

If there is one thing the hordes of Spanish language students love to do in Antigua, it must be bar hopping. The logic is quite simple: bored foreigners faced with the prospect of sitting around in their host families' houses generally prefer to hang out and meet other foreigners in bars (and converse in their native tongues, unfortunately). As expected, one soon becomes familiar with the drink specials on offer at each bar, and the respective timings of that crowd-drawing phenomenon called Ladies Night.

At Frida’s, Wednesday night was THE night. Yes, the place was named after the famous artist Frida Kahlo - numerous portraits of her adorned the walls. The gang found an upstairs table quite easily, and soon the place was bursting at the seams with gringos out for a night on the town. Quite the scene indeed. Mojitos were the night's special bargain – only Q5 ($0.67) for ladies but Q10 ($1.33) for lads, and the bar management was canny enough to provide different-shaped glasses to implement their pricing structure - short, stout glasses for the former, and tall, skinny glasses for the latter.

As I stood there talking to Byron, suddenly there was a brief commotion by our table and I saw an angry waiter stride away with a ladies' drink in his hand. Turns out that the vigilant waiter had seen Patrick (the dude beside me in the pic) holding on to Hannah’s glass briefly, and intrepreting this as an act of deception (and cheapness), he went ahead and snatched the drink right out of poor Patrick’s hand, at the same time sternly reprimanding him, “For ladies only!!!”. Never before had anyone seen anything like it. We all had a good laugh about the incident later, and Patrick took the good-natured ribbing in stride, and everyone acknowledged that what made the whole thing doubly hilarious was that as a seminary student he fit the unlikeliest profile of a petty thief.