Pub Crawl Part One: Old Town Edition
It’s February 6, so say “Kia Ora” to your Kiwi friends because it’s Waitangi Day! It’s also our favorite weekly holiday, Thirsty Thursday! We don’t mean to brag, but despite sometimes habitually ending up at a venue later mentioned, our Thursday nights are usually pretty epic. After A’s long day on the job, she tends to need quite a few drinks. So to kick off a series of pub crawl recommendations, we’re going to share with you one that is based in Edinburgh’s Old Town.
8:00PM Under the Stairs
You start your night meeting one of your budding Tinder-romances at Under the Stairs, a cozy cocktail bar nestled off of Candlemaker Row, near Grassmarket. With seating options that let you get cozy or keep your distance and music that’s not too loud, this is an optimal location for meeting someone for the first time.
What to order: fine selection of small plates, Tempranillo Rosé (because rosé makes us…...)
What to do: judge your date for which cocktail he orders
10:00PM** The Tron (the pub, not the church)
**Does the date go well? Then you may not make it to Tron until later. But seriously, leave by 11pm. In this scenario, this is a first date with a guy you met on Tinder.
After deciding the drinks are better than this guy’s chat, you ditch the dud to meet up with your girlfriends at The Tron, a friendly pub with a student vibe. Cheap drinks and cheesy music, what more could you want for an early night hangout? It’s best to go here with a group, as the crowd’s usually pretty low key.
What to order: there are always some good deals on Carlsberg, but drink specials vary
What to do: stumble over the next morning for a full Scottish breakfast and coffee for less than a fiver
1:00AM Espionage
By this point of the night, you should be sufficiently lubricated enough to stop giving any f*cks, and are probably looking for a crowded-high-energy place where your embarrassing running-man dance moves will be comparatively advanced to the moves of the other patrons.
Affectionately referred to as “The ‘Nage (pronounced nahhj)”, this 5-floor bar pseudo-club boasts eligible (visiting) bachelors, awful guilty pleasure music that you won’t mind belting out at 2am, and a Pringles machine that, historically, used to dispense Pringles (Get your shit together Espionage, the Pringles machine has been sold out for 3 weeks now!)
It is recommended that you leave Espionage without new company, so come 2:30am, find your girlfriend, peel her face away from the Eastern European she’s been making out with for the past hour, and head home. Staying until the last-call lights come on is almost as bad as seeing your pictures on Facebook the next day.
What to drink: who cares?
What to do: do you really need a suggestion at this point of the night?
So now that you’ve got our suggestions, get over yourself, and go out and have fun! Everyone else here is doing it.
Kia Ora,
D and A
P.S. We’ll be making more pub crawl suggestions every week, so you’ll have so many places to pick and choose from that you won’t know what to do.