Winning the night

Not to generalize but what sports bars are to Americans, pubs and particularly quiz night pubs seem to be a British/Irish animal. With very few real pubs in this town, the only place to head out for a night of pub food, beer, and social gathering around trivia is Murphy's, along Rufino St., Legaspi Village.

The first time I attended one of the quiz night events (Tuesday's from 8 pm onwards) our team composed of two Americans and two Filipinos, didn't do too badly. We seemed to have hit our stride with Irish films and actors (go DDL!), but lost it when it came to Irish sports and politics. We patted ourselves on the back for making it as far as we did, had some sticky toffee pudding and promised to do it again.

Unfortunately, the two Americans had to move on to another post, but last night, with the encouragement of another set of expat friends, I joined a team that was diverse in all manner of speaking - race, age, experience with quiz nights. We had folks who were strong in general information, literature, sports, and surprisingly science (we were all taken aback by how well we did in the latter topic). It worked out to our advantage that we maintained a steady score for most of the topics, and only faltered in one area - geography (ports in Finland? mountain passes in Eurasia?? gah!). At the end of a nail-biting evening, two teams breathing down our necks, we scraped by with a win! The lemon-pledgy shooters notwithstanding, we enjoyed working together to get over 80 answers right. B+ for us, and a free roast lunch one of these Sundays.