Friday 3 August 2012

Thursday night on George Street

Gord and I have had lunch a couple times on George Street this week ... we wandered over for a few drinks and live music to check it out at night.

The two block long street houses nothing but bars, pubs and restaurants. George Street is only open to pedestrians in the evenings and during most of the business day, only being open to traffic in the mornings to allow bars to restock their goods. The street has the most bars and pubs per square foot of any street in North America and is known to have bars that are open later than most others throughout Canada. The street does not usually become crowded with people until later at night, around midnight, and will remain busy until early in the morning, possibly as early as 6 am, despite the absence of the sale of alcohol. There are however, many hot dog vendors and 24 hour restaurants nearby. 

O'Reilly's has live music every night and we were able to grab a couple stools at the bar.


We got there about 8:30pm and Bill Kelly was playing traditional Newfoundland songs.


An old dude would get up and step dance along.


At about 11:30pm, the Irish Descendants came on.


By this time, the bar was jammed and people were up dancing.


The lead singer, Con O'Brien, is part of the family we did the whale and bird tour with earlier.  In fact, we discovered that had we done the 1:30pm tour rather than the 11:30am tour, Con would have been our guide rather than Justin.

We stayed for one set.  We were getting hungry (we hadn't eaten since our late lunch at Kelly's Pub).  We grabbed a slice of pepperoni and sausage pizza at Sal's, a couple doors down from O'Reilly's.  It hit the spot ... yum!


George Street was a happenin' spot!  Most of the bars were busy and as we walked back to our hotel room, we could hear tunes blasting ... it was an interesting mixture of dance tunes and Newfie music as we walked along the street.

1 comment:

JCB said...

What a cool experience!