"Nightlife" would be the obvious title for this section, but I often party more during the daytime. Shotgunning beers on top of an ancient Mayan pyramid in El Salvador at 10am in the morning is an experience that no downtown bar or club can recreate. Police are also less likely to cause you problems as well, since they find it unlikely that you would actually be wasted at such an odd hour.
This list is not limited to only bars and clubs, but also festivals and other interesting places for hanging out and being a public nuisance. As with the alcohol section, it is restricted to locations listed in the blog. At the risk of sounding sentimental, the quality of a place depends on my personal experience there. I want to avoid focusing on the usual tourism cliches of quality:
1. Local experience: The favorite of Lonely Planet, e.g. "For people in the know..." Seriously, a lot of local places are small, creepy shitholes filled with ultra-nationalist, inbreed retards who look to fight (or fuck) the first foreigner who steps foot into "their" bar. The United States gets a bad reputation for its rednecks, but this (in)breed of human is present in every country in the world.
2. Price: We get it. You're a backpacker on a limited budget. That doesn't mean you have to frequent the cheapest possible bar in every city you visit. Chances are your "shoestring" travel budget is still more than the monthly salary of the third world country you're backpacking through.
3. Beautiful People: You're a guy who dreams of hooking up with some hot Eastern Europe chick, or a girl who dreams of hooking up with a "Latin Lover," mi amor. Yeah, if you go to meat market clubs, you will be meat. More likely you will be that foreign girl getting groped by every local guy ("I thought American girl are easy, like in movie?,) or that foreign guy who gets in a drunken fight for hitting on some local guy's girlfriend ("I thought girls in this country love English men?")
4. "Hip": The fact that guidebooks still use this word to describe bars and clubs is pathetic. If your main concern is that you are at the coolest spot in town, then you aren't that cool to begin with.
5. Location: You're already traveling. Why do you care where the bar is located? Ideally you should be having enough fun at the place that the scenery isn't important.
This is gonna take a while... I need a drink.
This list is not limited to only bars and clubs, but also festivals and other interesting places for hanging out and being a public nuisance. As with the alcohol section, it is restricted to locations listed in the blog. At the risk of sounding sentimental, the quality of a place depends on my personal experience there. I want to avoid focusing on the usual tourism cliches of quality:
1. Local experience: The favorite of Lonely Planet, e.g. "For people in the know..." Seriously, a lot of local places are small, creepy shitholes filled with ultra-nationalist, inbreed retards who look to fight (or fuck) the first foreigner who steps foot into "their" bar. The United States gets a bad reputation for its rednecks, but this (in)breed of human is present in every country in the world.
2. Price: We get it. You're a backpacker on a limited budget. That doesn't mean you have to frequent the cheapest possible bar in every city you visit. Chances are your "shoestring" travel budget is still more than the monthly salary of the third world country you're backpacking through.
3. Beautiful People: You're a guy who dreams of hooking up with some hot Eastern Europe chick, or a girl who dreams of hooking up with a "Latin Lover," mi amor. Yeah, if you go to meat market clubs, you will be meat. More likely you will be that foreign girl getting groped by every local guy ("I thought American girl are easy, like in movie?,) or that foreign guy who gets in a drunken fight for hitting on some local guy's girlfriend ("I thought girls in this country love English men?")
4. "Hip": The fact that guidebooks still use this word to describe bars and clubs is pathetic. If your main concern is that you are at the coolest spot in town, then you aren't that cool to begin with.
5. Location: You're already traveling. Why do you care where the bar is located? Ideally you should be having enough fun at the place that the scenery isn't important.
This is gonna take a while... I need a drink.
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