The Guardian has a strange (to me) story about the world’s cocaine bar, called Route 36. It’s in La Paz, Bolivia, and because it’s an after-hours club which, you read that right, serves cocaine, it’s constantly on the move. For some reason, the neighbors tend to complain.
It’s not the idea of a cocaine bar that’s so strange to me, though. That part actually seems, well, inevitable. No, it’s this part of the description that got me shaking my head.
Down in Route 36’s main room, the scene is chilled. A half-hearted disco ball sporadically bathes the room in red and green light. Each table has candles and a stash of bottled water, plus whatever mixers one cares to add to your drink. In the corner, a pile of board games includes chess, backgammon, and Jenga, the game in which a steady hand pulls out bricks from a tower of blocks until the whole pile collapses. If it weren’t for the heads bobbing down like birds scouring the seashore for food, you would never know that huge amounts of cocaine were being casually ingested.
I’ve never used cocaine personally, so I can’t speak from experience, but I never would have imagined board games, especially Jenga, as a pair for coke. Video games, maybe, but Jenga?
