Famous Chicken Drop
By mcdog | April 12, 2007
We had missed the World Famous Chicken Drop two weeks running. Wednesday night at The Pier Lounge, early evening.
The Pier Lounge has become a favourite place for us to call for a drink at the end of our evening in town just before heading back to our apartment, either, in our grander days, jumping in the golf cart and roaring off into the night or in these more penurious times, walking the two miles along the dark beach. definitely the most pleasant time of day to make the walk. In the daylight, which usually means bright sunlight, we need to stop at bars along the way to take on liquids, purely for health reasons, of course.
So there we were, sitting at the bar, myself with a bottle of Belize’s own beer, Belikin, and Herself with one of The Pier’s fine margaritas. Bottles of beer in Belize are always served with a paper napkin wrapped around the bottleneck, so the customer can wipe away any rust or crud from the top. Seem to remember the same happens in Mexico, will investigate on the return journey. The movie Maverick is on the large tv above the bar, with English subtitles, handy in a crowded bar but The Pier is not crowded yet, in fact it’s almost empty. That changed quickly at about 6pm, a queue leading to a table at the back soon formed and I leaped up to join it. The maximum bet was $5BZ, so I paid and pulled my five numbers from the bucket for drop number one, 40,76,53,93 and 13. I felt lucky, my ship could be coming in, this could be my lucky day.
I went back to the bar to calm my nerves with a swig of cold Belikin and prepare for the big event. The queue kept growing. I was glad we had been warned to be there early, not that I’ve ever needed much encouragement to be early at the bar. We had never seen The Pier so crowded, certainly more crowded than at the bingo event the night before, where had all these people been hiding?
Outside, on the beach, the excitement was growing. The arena was a board with numbers painted on it and surrounded by a net. The proprietor was explaining the rules of the game to the crowd and called for a volunteer to ‘chuck’ the first chicken. Some poor soul was nominated by his friends on account of it being his birthday and was instructed in how to lift a chicken, not forgetting to blow on it’s arse, and plant it somewhere in ‘the ring’. The crowd then clapped, shouted, whistled, flapped their arms about, waved the netting and generally tried to frighten the slightly stunned looking chicken into doing what chickens do best, crap, preferably on their number, or most preferably, on one of my numbers. I think the number to suffer that indignity was 16, it wasn’t 40,76,53,93 or 13, so we said goodnight, leaving the crowd to enjoy several more rounds of Chicken Drop and stumbled home along the beach dreaming of the riches that might have been ours.
Topics: ambergris caye01 | 2 Comments »
August 16th, 2007 at 8:44 am
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September 14th, 2007 at 8:30 pm
[...] We had missed the World Famous Chicken Drop two weeks running. Wednesday night at The Pier Lounge, early evening. The Pier Lounge has become a favourite place for us to call for a drink at the end of our evening in town just before heading back to our apartment, either, in our grander days, jumping in the golf cart and roaring off into the night or in these more penurious times, walking the two miles along the dark beach. definitely the most pleasant time of day to make the walk. In the daylight, which usually means bright sunlight, we need to stop at bars along the way to take on liquids, purely for health reasons, of course. So there we were, sitting at the bar, myself with a bottle of Belize’s own beer, Belikin, and Herself with one of The Pier’s fine margaritas. Bottles of beer in Belize are always served with a paper napkin wrapped around the bottleneck, so the customer can wipe away any rust or crud from the top. Read more [...]