party on down

Queenstown is very much a party-oriented town, with happy hours all over the place, DJs every night, drink specials for backpackers, etc. The place to be (at least for the start of the night before the DJ starts murdering the mood with extreme song-by-song genre changes like Rage Against The Machine's Killing In The Name to ABBA's Dancing Queen) is the World Bar. A good little night-spot which is generally pumping most nights, and which has coincidentally played host to myself and bunch of other guys from Magic every night since we've been here..
Monday night we made it into the Minus 5 bar. As you may have guessed, the temperature in this small room is kept at a refreshing -5 degrees Celsius all year round. Ice sculptures adorn the walls, the couches are made of ice, the entire drinks bar including spirit shelves.. ice.. You even drink from ice glasses. They do provide huge eskimo-type jackets and gloves for the approximate half-hour visit to this bizarre place, which is just as well.
Weather has been a bit hit-and-miss here in Qtown the past couple of days. Monday morning we woke up to snow falling. About an hour and a half later, the skies had cleared and sun was shining brightly. Maybe another 4 hours after that, rain..
Yesterday, the 800m long luge track was calling me from the top of a nearby mountain, so Gus (an Irish guy I met from Magic) and I caught the gondola (the cable-car style) up there to check it out. Man, the luge is some great fun, but quite dangerous if you lose control or concentration around one of those sharp bends in the track.. Right off the edge of the mountain!! Fortunately, they wouldn't let you on the course unless you were wearing one of their barely-secured, flimsy, 3-sizes-too-big helmets, which I'm confident would have saved our lives had we been involved in an accident of that magnitude..
Did you know that if you did every activity in Queenstown, it would cost you about $6,500!! I wonder what else they could come up with to boost that to $10,000? Maybe Extreme Shopping, where you get tied into a shopping trolley, air-lifted in a helicopter to the top of Mount Cook, and dropped out.. Not dangerous enough? You could add in pillars of toilet paper rolls and baked bean cans as obstacles, and before you get to the bottom, you will need to have purchased 10 items to the total of $13.57.. EXTREME!!! I might draw up a business plan, see if I can get things moving..
So I realised, in Franz, that I had lost my new hoodie. Shit! I managed to track it down in a hostel in Westport, where I left it after doing a wash. What to do, what to do? I knew I probably wouldn't get back up there again.. Luckily, Lois, the owner of the TripInn backpackers was nice enough to post it to my new temporary address at the hostel in Qtown. It arrived yesterday, and I haven't let it out of my sight since (that probably has something to do with the fact that it's quite cold and I've not taken it off).
Today, just a bit of light house-keeping, emails, washing, catching up on my written travel diary, and generally chilling out.. As if I hadn't done enough of that the past couple of days..

I've added a few more photos to the below post, so check 'em out.

Photos:
1. How's this for a cigarette dispenser? In the World Bar
2. Keeping warm.. with Lolita from the Minus 5 bar