Dance the Night Away

The second week of our language course wasn't initially that eventful in terms of trips. We'd had another one of our exciting culture lectures, but apart form that, life in Camerino had ebbed to quite a pedestrian pace. After a busy first week this was actually a welcome surprise and in view of the busy schedule over the next fortnight, taking some time off to study and do, quite frankly, what we'd gone there to do, made a lot of sense.

Still there are always exceptions to this atom of logic and the school organised a trip one evening to Babaloo, a club on the Rimini coast. If enough people went then it would make it worth their while to get a coach and when questioned, the majority of people were up for it. I was in that majority.

Bree wasn't. If she didn't have a skirt for the opera, she probably didn't have a dress for a club. There's absolutely nothing wrong with this. I will fully admit to going because most other people were and I didn't want to miss out on anything. I've never been a party animal, but after a week of doing not very much, it was nice to go out and let me hair down, so to speak.

We met at the bus station and piled on the coach - us at the back as usual. It was going to take about an hour and a half to get there, so we settled down for what was to be quite a long ride before the party could start. Most people were quite reserved and were saving any boozing until we got to the club - this made for probably the slowest start to a party in living history.

We all stumbled out of the coach at the club - not because we were drunk, but because we were really sleepy; there's nothing that will induce a state of drowsiness quite like a long coach trip at night. We had left at ten to arrive at midnight. To put this into context, I like to go to bed at 10pm.

The first thing we did when we reached the club was to head to the bar - we needed something that would perk us up a little. Wait. Drinks are 10Eur each. Each. EACH! I suppose it was free entry. I thought I could do without. Lynette buckled and her housemate pressganged someone into buying drink for her. Handy.

Anyway, this matter dealt with, we started to get acclimatised with our surroundings.

First of all, it was out in the open. There was a large building that looked like a house and a courtyard area as soon as you got through the gates. There were plush leather seats and lots of palm trees and the like - it was very swish. The house-like building had several rooms - two main areas and plenty of chillaxing space with more leather seats. The whole place was built on the edge of a lake and at the end of a jetty was a salsa hut.

It was a fantastic place. The music wasn't my scene really, but it was great to go and get out and do some dancing. Things didn't really pick up for a few hours. Bearing in mind we got there at midnight and left at three, it was only 2'o'clock that things started hotting up and there was any real atmosphere to speak of. After the first hour we were considering going and sitting on the coach until we had to leave. Fortunately we didn't do this.

So we sat for a while, then we moved to the salsa tent. For anyone that's every seen me dance, I can't really do it and certainly not salsa. I was wearing flat shoes and I had a wayward bag - this was not a recipe for much fun. Still I kept calm and carried on and after sitting awhile some more, the Camerino gang reassembled itself and we danced the last hour away and even convinced the bus driver to let us stay an extra half hour.

We were back very late that night and I walked back to our house with Gaby. She was a little out of sorts and it turned out there had been an incident with one of the guys on the course. He'd made a move, she didn't want him to, the poo had hit the fan, yady-yady-yah.

At the time this happened, she was still in love with her English sort-of-boyfriend and she was incandescant with rage at the very thought that her coursemate would make a move on her. This made me take a certain dislike to this guy, but I soon found out this was ever-so slightly misplaced, but we'll deal with that when we come to it.

So I went to sleep that morning and let's just say when Wendy rolled out whatever nonsense we were learning in class, I was less than receptive...