But last night, they filled the pub. It's not that they were ill behaved or anything, it's just that there were so many of them. Made us feel a bit old, to tell you the truth, until friends our age and older showed up to balance things out a bit. It was fun to listen to them gossip about the teachers, though. It will be even more fun to drop tidbits of this new-found information into conversations with the relevant teachers or, better still, their friends.

I played darts last night, and it actually seemed to help my back. It's the left side that's got the pulled muscle or whatever it is, and I am right handed, so throwing didn't make it hurt any worse. And the movement of the throwing and moving around in general seems to have loosened things up a bit. My back feels strange and a bit tingly today, but it's not hurting near as bad as it was. Then again, it wasn't so bad yesterday early on; it was later that the real pain started to set in.

After the pub closed and they kicked us out, we went to the Green Bar. We've never been to the Green Bar before, although we have gone to the restaurant upstairs, which is excellent. Usually we go to the Evil Late Night Bar, which is, of course, closed for the holidays.

The front room of Green Bar looks an awful lot like a hotel bar, filled with small-patterned maroon couches and poufy stools around low tables. The bar itself is kind of funky-- curvy, with lighting under the rails. The back room looks like your average local dive, with battered wood, two pool tables, and a couple of arcade video games. They had a dart board as well, but we decided to play pool. Elvis and I haven't played pool in ages, and Janet never had. Elvis, however, is very, very good, so the teams were him and Janet, and me and Jack. Which would have been good and fair if I had managed to make even one single shot. In my defense, the table was much shorter than American pools tables, and the pockets were the smaller, billiard style ones. All my shots kept bouncing back off the corners of the pockets instead of going in. I'll have to work on that. Of course, I'm sure it had nothing to do with the bottle of wine I drank at the pub, or the beers afterward.

So we gave up on the pool, and hung out on the couches in the front room until they closed and kicked us out.

We got home at-- you guessed it-- 5 am.

It was nice, but not as fun as the All Singing, All Dancing Evil Late Night Bar experience. Certainly not as crowded, though, and considering my back, it was definitely a good thing to be able to sit down.