Part of turning 21 in a college town is going bar-hopping—I did it, and continue to do it for every one of my friends who turns that much-coveted age. I’ll go with my sister, cousins, and anyone else I know who is reaching that number, because all of us over-21-ers know that going bar-hopping with someone who knows the bars best makes all the difference in the world. I mean, let’s face it, if I’d gone out to the bars by myself or with friends who didn’t know any better, I probably would have ended up at the Peacock first—that’s all you really hear about on campus. But we all know that the Peacock can ruin bars for a long time if it is the first experience you have.
So of course on this special occasion I chose to take our group to Magenta first. Magenta houses one of the best bartenders in town, Robbie Wilson. The prices there do run high, around $10 on average for a drink, but Robbie can mix up a drink on the spot simply by knowing your likes and dislikes—it’s well worth your precious dollars. Besides, the show he puts on while he makes drinks is worth being sober for—after all Magenta is a classy place, people.
The next bars I took us to were Downward Dog and Cloud and Kelly’s, and honestly it doesn’t matter which one you go to first because they share the same owner and are right next to each other. However, Cloud and Kelly’s has a great Irish pub feel so if you love Flogging Molly, hit up that one first. Since Magenta is right on 3rd Street, it’s time-friendly to visit these two 2nd Street bars. They have great happy hour specials later in the evening for food and drinks, which is perfect for refueling. The bartenders are also pretty good-looking. So here we spend some time filling up on cheap macaroni and cheese, chicken strips, and fries with some excellent Fuzzy Persians and Bellinis—hey, I never said this was good for you.
Next on the list was Clodfelter’s. They’re on Monroe so it was a long walk, but by the time we got there we were tipsy enough to enjoy how crowded it was—like it always is—and we weren’t afraid to get our dance on. The reason we came here was for the excellent Long Island iced tea—it’s cheap and has just the right amount of alcohol in it. It was a good thing I was already buzzed, though, because otherwise all of the pushing and shoving and drink-spilling necessary to get to the bartender would have really irritated me. This is that bar where you get the ladies who wear those ridiculous five-inch stiletto heels and then get drunk enough that they can’t walk in them. People here bump into everyone while spilling their drinks all over because they realistically need a five-foot radius of space around them at all times to give room for said drunken maneuvering.
The next place we hit up was Sancho’s. It’s right next to Clodfelter’s and has pretty much the same atmosphere with the exception of the pukers on the balcony. It seemed like a nice idea to have a drink and then go outside on the second floor balcony to enjoy the night air. Well, we were most certainly wrong about that one. The moment we got out there people were running out to the balcony and puking off of it because the bathroom was already filled with pukers. I guess that’s a word to the wise for anyone walking down Monroe at night underneath Sancho’s.
After that we went to the Peacock. We were all pretty drunk at this point and my friend wanted to see what all the popularity was about. We went in and once again, there were more drunk folks grinding their behinds all over anything that moved. I guess it’s pretty easy to get to that point when the prized drink of the Peacock is the $1 to $2 Pabst Blue Ribbon beer—talk about a real fancy drink. Anyway, we had one beer, not Pabst, went upstairs and checked out the dance floor. Here was another disgusting display of the idiocy of intoxicated college kids. You wouldn’t believe how many girls had torn their dresses trying to do some sort of pole dance on some dude. So onward we went.
At this point we are drunk so we chug some water on our way to our last stop—Harrison’s. The place is pretty calm and plays really great music so it was the perfect spot to get one last drink before calling it a night. You won’t find the drunk and rowdy college kids here. This is for people who aren’t making a flamboyant display of how much they’ve had to drink.
I realize that this order of operations wasn’t the most efficient way of going from one section of Corvallis to the other, but this is definitely the most efficient in terms of cost and enjoyment. This path gave us the perfect amount of intoxication to get the most out of each place because honestly you would never go to the Peacock sober—there isn’t any other way to be around the Snookies and Situations of Corvallis.
By Cristina Himka
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