Friday

Part of our Friday ritual of late seems to be gathering a group of people together after work and heading out for a few drinks at a local watering hole. Unfortunately, it’s getting harder and harder to get a seat at a pub on Fridays, and most of the time we spend 20 minutes walking around before we find anything where we can get it. Smiley O’Neils is a cool pub right near work that I really like, but I think the secret is out on that place, because I can never seem to get a seat there.. Malones (Seymour and Pender) has recently finished renovating, which means they now have a bunch more seats available. Even so, a group of about six of us were left sitting at the bar most of the night.

This seems to be a growing problem in Vancouver in general — a complete lack of pubs and bars. Apparently there are a fixed number of liquor licenses available in the downtown core. What that means is that you can’t just walk in and open up a new pub — you have to purchase a liquor license off someone else. Unfortunately, this means that as the population continues the grow in Vancouver, the number of pubs per person continues to decline. This leads to those huge lines you see everywhere on the weekends, and growing frustration amongst bar patrons who wait hours to get into a club on the weekend. The bar owners must love it since they can somehow get away with charging $20 cover to get in now (a few years ago $10 was pretty steep).

After Malone’s we headed to Carderos for a few drinks. On our way home, Hesty and I stopped at Six Acres for a quick drink. All in all a pretty fun night, although I am a bit hungover today (which makes a great excuse to sit on the couch in flannel pants and read).