There are so many beach bars in Dar and I don’t really use them but this day I was not in a rush, I was hot and sweaty and it was too early to go home and hide in air-con. I stopped at my local bar and ordered a beer and sat next to an Australian man.
The beer in a beach bar is crazy cheap at 2,500/= and the view is a lot better than many more expensive places. OK so you have to sit on plastic chairs at plastic tables with crows shitting on you from the tree above but the atmosphere makes up for it.
Today it started raining always immediately I got there and so I ran from the beach took shelter with the others in the bar area. The Australian man is too nice for his own good and local children really take advantage of his good nature by getting him to buy soda for them. He enjoys doing this and the kids pretend to be his friend and laugh at him behind his back.
Never mind – he’s getting something out of the relationship and so are they. The fact that the bar staff swindled him out of 10,000/= is more troubling, and even then, the man did not mind that they’d done this. His thinking is “It’s not a lot of money so I don’t mind”.
It’s no wonder he has so many local ‘friends’ around the bar area. He comes every Saturday and Sunday, drinks up to 10 bottles of beer, gets drunk and then wobbles home and crashes out asleep. He does this every weekend without fail. What a boring life.
Beach bars are great and I enjoy sitting there looking at the kids playing in the sea, doing somersaults in the sand, playing football but you really have to have your wits about you to not get ripped off.
I insisted on the waitress giving me the change from what I had bought even though it was a small amount. She wasn’t going to bother – maybe she thought I was associated with the Aussie man.
As I said to him, it’s not the amount of money, it’s the principle. Would we allow waitresses at home to take all the money and not bring change? I doubt he would be such a pushover in Australia.