This past June, I was able to study abroad with the Mass Communications College at Texas Tech. It was exhilarating, exciting, and exhausting all at the same time. However, there was one moment during the trip that I will always cherish. I remember this pub fondly. The Salty Dog was probably the most fun and the most included I ever felt during that trip.
This was our second or third night in Dundee, Scotland and we were all itching to go out. I joined up with about four other girls as we explored the depths of Dundee, looking for an exciting place to drink. One of the girls in my group remembered seeing a cute little pub one our way over to another pub, so we stopped there after our adventure at The George Orwell Public House. We were all pretty buzzed from the strange, out of place, Scots-Mexican restaurant and enjoyed each other's company as we made our way over to The Salty Dog, the cute little pub we saw on the way to George Orwell.
At first, it was kind of dead. There were strobe lights and artificial fog filling up the tiny pub. We sat at the bar and had our drinks, sipping them carefully since we were used to the watered down alcohol that we were all used to drinking. Truthfully, it was a fun little place. The bartender played all kinds of songs after 1975, and the people were friendly. We were all singing and dancing along to the music that was playing and even talked to some of the patrons.
In Scotland, the sun sets at about 10 pm in the summers. When the sun set in Dundee, the pub came alive with a colorful bunch of people. That is when reality hit us.
Oh shit.
We are in a gay bar.
I'd never been in a gay bar, let alone a bar in general. However, I felt like this was a chance of a lifetime. I would probably never come back to this little pub, filled with the LGBT community of an artsy-fartsy town in Scotland.
I ordered a large Strongbow Cider. The alcohol allowed me to let loose as my classmates and I bobbed our heads and shimmied to "Uptown Funk" and "Ain't Your Mama". We talked about where we would go next and what the future held for this trip. We talked about what was happening with The Brexit and how Boris Johnson and Donald Trump were probably long lost brothers. We made friends with some of the patrons, who were charming and funny. We even got a free shot of orange liqueur from a lovely transgender woman. As it was getting late and we had all had our separate plans the next day, we skipped (well, I skipped. Everyone else looked at me funny.) back to our hotel, taking with us fond memories of a little gay bar in the middle of Dundee, Scotland.
