Les boîtes de nuit

Last night I went out with some model friends to my first Réunionnaise night club. The night clubs have big patios with breezy palm trees, soft strings of lights, and giant dance floors. They play a surprisingly catchy techno mix of English and French pop songs. Everyone dances. Everyone sits at small round tables, and everyone buys bottles of Smirnoff vodka that cost 100 euro.

Going out with my model friends is quite terrifying. They aren't like my other friends here, who don't mind speaking slow for me and repeating themselves several times. My model friends speak fast and a few seem slightly annoyed if I ask for a repeat. The conversation feels like I am balancing on a giant ball that keeps moving forward...with or without me still on top. At any second, I could fall off. I'm always nervous, I'm always straining to catch any word I recognize in the sentence as it flies by, so I can make some educated guess on what they are saying. It's a stressful game, but I confess that I kind of like the adrenaline. The chance to succeed or fail. To practice.

In the nightclub, though, everyone speaks the same language. The music is too loud for words, so people resort to a kind of sign-body language. I'm good at this language, thanks to the years I spent waiting tables in front of live bands. Last night, I sat back and just watched the conversations for a little while. The girl next to me was complaining about how big her nose was and how she wanted to cut it off (cue scissor hand movement across the nose.) The girl across the dance floor was telling her friend to cheer up (cue constant «smile» movement with fingers across an over dramatic grin). A couple at the table next to ours was arguing because the girl wanted to dance and the boy wanted to leave. (There was a certain amount of  flailing of arms in this conversation). It made me laugh because these are conversations that could happen at a club anywhere in the world. Nightclub language is universal. 

The parties here don't stop until 6am. As an ex-bar employee, I cringe at this. You also don't tip, so I wonder how the bartenders are paid. Maybe it helps that a vodka red bull costs 12 euro. The music is predominantly American, which I found a little surprising because no one knows what the words mean or what the song is about, including the best of my English-speaking friends.

Mostly, I learned that in nightclub language, words don't matter. 

Just dance.