The Matt Faus Blog

Last night I went to a “Pub Quiz” with several of my classmates at a Pub called the Sherlock Holmes deep in the heart of downtown. It cost 1 Euro to enter the contest if you’re a student, and then if you get enough of the trivia questions correct, you can win prizes. It was pretty fun to be on a team and hang out with everyone, but I really suck at trivia. I think it’s an engineering thing - too much mental optimization to remember all these little factoids. Anyway, our team won the first round but got second place overall since we had seven people on our team, each of which was a deduction of one point on our total score. I got a nifty little backpack out of the deal, so it was definitely worth the Euro!

When we left around midnight, Stephanie (who was out for her last night before leaving Valencia) and I were really ready to keep going. We had a little bit of a time convincing everyone else to roam around downtown for a little longer, but they finally gave in. We had a grand time stopping by club after club and meeting all kinds of different people. There was one place called Club Blau where we met a group of about 15 people from Texas A&M, here for a summer Spanish program, kind of like me. Small world, eh?

I never have been much of a fan of downtown nightlife in Dallas, but I really like what I experienced last night. The streets and buildings down there are so crammed tightly together that it’s almost like the entire downtown area is one big club, with all kinds of people roaming the streets. It also feels safe since everything is well lit and you don’t have to walk past “dark corners”. Also, there’s no cover charge to get in anywhere, you just stop in wherever you please. Overall, it just seems much more casual and relaxed instead of some kind of social spectacle, which is the feeling I get in Dallas sometimes - people wanting to be seen in beautiful clothes and in beautiful places to make themselves feel good. Anyway, it’s a lot of fun!