Bye-Bye, Bitches

What you see above is a common sight late on a Thursday evening at the Bar Vert Anglais. The woman in the center of the adoring throng is Hannah, and the adorers are all members of Hannah's Bitches, the winningest team in the weekly Vert Anglais pub quiz. Needless to say, I'm on the team.

For those of you (predominantly in the States) who don't know about these things, the pub quiz is an institution imported from Great Britain in which various bits of trivia are asked, teams decide on an answer, and the scores are graded at the end, with a prize given to the winning team. The Vert Angalis was the first bar in town to institute one, and within a couple of weeks, the other Irish (and English) pubs followed suit. Pub quizzes, you see, particularly bilingual ones in a town with a lot of students, bring in an awful lot of drinkers.

The way George, the barman who runs the quiz, does it is there are three rounds. The first is music. Now, you'd think that this is where the Bitches would rule, because not only am I on the team, but so is Bart, who covered music when he was a reporter on a New Jersey newspaper, and there are usually a couple of young women -- by which I mean 19-25 -- on the team. But George's taste in music is very odd. I've never heard of about 1/3 of the groups he plays, and neither has anyone else on our team, although other teams seem to do very well with them. George's idea of an old record is one from, oh, 2007. He's got a penchant for lazily strummed acoustic guitars and boys and girls with wispy voices singing about not much. Also, to be fair to the French players, he usually sticks in one French artist (or an artist like Supertramp, who were apparently huge here). Rarely will anything from the '60s, '70s, '80s, or '90s get included. And if those younger women don't show, our score's even worse.

The second round is "general knowledge," ie, trivia. This is where we shine. What nation exports the most wool? You're drinking a Red Stripe Beer in the country where it's made: where are you? How many plays did Shakespeare write? What year did the Berlin Wall go up? Where was the first World Cup played? (That's weird enough that I even remember it now: Uruguay.) What country has the longest life-expectancy? If you're spending dongs, what country are you in? (Come on, I'm not going to give you all the answers).

Given the miscellaneous backgrounds of the various Bitches, we usually do very, very well on this one.

The final round is a sheet of paper with pictures on it. There are flags, there are cars, there are guitars sometimes, but usually there are lots and lots of celebrities or movie stills. We've got one flag expert, I can sometimes do cars or guitars, but the young women do the best with the celebrities, and yet they'd be the first to admit that they don't do very well.

The answers are collected, George withdraws behind the bar, and then he reads out the top four teams. Then, someone from Hannah's Bitches goes and picks up the bottle of Wyborovka vodka we've won, as well as some crappy orange juice to mix it with, which is a sin, in my estimation.

Well, not all the time. Our 19-year-old, who usually brings one of her friends, hasn't been around for ages, and neither has her father, Hannah's boss. This former means less-than-optimal music results, the latter the extra point that puts us over in general knowledge. Sometimes there are trick questions. And sometimes, as George has noted, the large size of our team causes us to over-think things. Some of the questions aren't as tricky as we decide they are. Sometimes, the other teams just get lucky.

The rules say you can't use cell phones or mobile browsers to answer questions. Having someone at home with Google fired up is not an option. Which is not to say that creative solutions don't present themselves. One week George asked for the name of the church (whose crypt is part of the city museum) which had stood in the Place Jean Jaurès, and Bart suddenly realized that he needed a cigarette badly. So as not to disturb any of the drinkers outside the Vert Anglais, he decided to enjoy it in the Place Jean Jaurès. Unfortunately, he only half-read the sign, so that subterfuge fizzled.

Anyway, it's fun for me to get out of the house, and although a lot of the other teams are made up of American students, who seem to be very young and very wealthy, and drink very much and get very loud (and sometimes aren't very bright: a young woman overheard me talking at the bar and asked if I were American, and when I said yes, asked me where I was from, so I said Texas to save time, and her reply was "Well, I guess you're upset about the election, then, aren't you?"), and they make it hard to hear the music (impossible, in fact, at times) and to hear George's questions, it doesn't matter because we win.

But the next couple of weeks will see the end of the University of Montpellier's year, and the students have to knuckle down to take their finals, so last Thursday's pub quiz, which Hannah, who's just moved into a new apartment, missed (causing Bart to re-name the team Where's Hannah?) was the last one until October. This is too bad, too, or maybe not. My social life since I arrived here has pretty much revolved around the Vert Anglais, and while I like the place and really like the folks who run it, since they've gone out of their way to be good to me, I really need to start broadening my circles here and making new networks. Of course, once the students leave, the Vert Anglais will become a much nicer bar for us older (read: over 30) types, and their salads and their hamburger at lunchtime can't be beat, so I'll be there for that. (The question of how a bar owned by British people, from a country which makes wretched hamburgers, in the south of France, the country that gave us Quick burgers, with a French chef, turns out such a fantastic burger will, I hope, be addressed in a later post, but first I have to figure it out myself).

So goodbye to the Bitches -- at least the ones who'll be leaving for the summer -- and goodbye to the quiz probably means hello to an opportunity to meet some new people and learn more about Montpellier. First, though, I have to live through the next month, which, because of a lawsuit I can't talk about which stems from income I thought I'd have by now and don't, and no money coming in until June, is going to be just horrible, at least from how it looks now. My big hope was to spend this weekend getting the jalapeño, serrano, and tomatillo seeds planted, along with some basil out on the balcony, but I've only got €70 left, so that's out of the question. I won't be going out, although I've been forcing myself to leave the house at least once a day for an hour, and I can't dally over a drink at the Vert Anglais or any other bar, let alone a coffee or a lemonade. I hope this passes (and that I don't), because the weather's gotten nice and this is what I moved here for. Stay tuned.