Visit to the local Meat Market

After four years of going out in France I thought I had seen it all. But Jongleurs, where we went for Susanne's Hen Do last night made the meat markets I had seen in France seem really pleasant places. I genuinely didn’t think such a place could possibly exist. But it does.
It all started by a comedy act, which was really funny at points, but for me a good comedian is one that makes you laugh without explicit and crude references to body parts and physiological functions. The three we saw last night apparently did not judge themselves funny enough to be able to make people laugh without mentioning penises, faeces and using the f word as a comma. Oh well.
This came with the worst burger I have ever had in my entire life, it was a piece of cardboard with something inside pretending to be meat and failing miserably at it. Could you believe that there is such thing as tasteless onion? There is. I still ate it, cause I needed something to soak up the liquid that was pretending to be Sex on the Beach and also failing miserably at it (later I saw them make one, and well, it was vodka orange with a suspicion of some red juice that made the whole thing sort of pink).
Then, after the comedy act, there was dancing. And I couldn’t believe my eyes. It was meat market in all it’s glory, girls on the dance floor trying to look appealing and blokes cruising around, appreciating the goods. It was so obvious it was disgusting. At least in France they were discreet about it, even if no one was fooled. And I was regretting with all my heart having worn that skirt, I wished I had worn baggy trousers and a big t-shirt. Cause even if I wore what I wore in complete ignorance of the nature of the place I was going to, still wearing what I was, I was considered to be goods. And it probably didn’t help that I was looking around which undoubtedly got interpreted as making myself available while it was sheer curiosity and total bewilderment with what was going on around me.
Worse still, the place stank of what I could only tentatively identify as years of spilt beer, vomit and urine combined with unwashed bodies and drying sweat. It made me sick. Naomi said she could feel a whiff of something unpleasant in the bar area, but my smell being more acute than that of many people, I could smell it everywhere and the aroma in the bar area was literally contorting my insides.
The final straw was when my bum got pinched by one of the cruising clients (testing the goods, I presume, finding out if the meat was firm enough to suit his liking). It was around 11.30 and I realised that they were all still relatively sober – I decided not to wait to see what would happen as they became properly drunk and I fled. Don’t get me wrong, I still had fun. I was there with really interesting people I appreciate a lot, Susanne in her Gretel costume was absolutely fabulous, some of the comedy stuff was genuinely funny and my inner cultural anthropologist was very much fascinated with the phenomena around. But I'm never setting my foot in that place again.