Jimbo - Budapest: poker, booze and a strip bar.

Pretty happy to be alive today. Good gig at Kultiplex (Budapest) last night and excellent backstage poker/booze session afterwards which somehow ended with me and Tommy (our sax man) in what we thought was a reputable Budapest strip bar (good move guys!). Turns out it was a brothel. Run by Hungarian gangsters. With a minimum drinks spend of around £150 per head, if you catch my drift. Unfortunately we only found all this out when we tried to leave after a couple of beers. Turns out the five foot wide/five foot tall boss of the place (plus his six massive scar-faced heavies) weren’t all that responsive to the bumbling excuses of a couple of pissed tourists. They didn’t believe we had nowhere near the amount of money they demanded to let us leave the place without getting our faces smashed-up, so two of them frogmarched me to a cash point (I couldn’t get any cash out) while the others strip-searched Tommy in the back room. Finally after about half an hour of threatening us with things which are far too dark for a family blog like this they were happy to nick our mobile phones and kick us out onto the streets. So kids, if you find yourself in an ex-Communist country at 3am looking for a place to go – just don’t.