London… 1st installment
I guess I need to take over where Peter left off. If you want to know some of what I’ve been up to before now then check out his tour diary.
Friday after leaving Peter at Heathrow his friend Mikey quite generously drove me all the way to Amy’s place in Greenwich. London roads are crazy. Think New York and then think the complete opposite. No grids around here. But with Mikey’s driving experience on England’s roads we were able to decode the signs and get to Amy’s in not too long.
Being the party animals we are we then headed off to waste the rest of our Friday night doing grocery shopping at Sainsbury’s down the road. This supermarket is completely run on green power. There are windmills out the front generating electricity for the entire place. All of Greenwich is a bit weird. A lot of it was constructed around the millenium and so looks nothing like the rest of London. It reminds me a lot of Homebush in Sydney with its perfectly landscaped streets, smooth roads and not a person in sight.
**New and interesting note which I previously forgot to mention: Sainsbury’s had a Boom Bip track playing in the store. Most impressive. Maybe an employee with some musical taste got hold of the stereo that evening.**
We had a late start to the day after a late night of watching the Glastonbury festival on tv. Despite the rain we headed off to Oxford Circus to battle through the crowds and do a spot of shopping. Since before leaving Australia I’d been threatened with being dragged off to Top Shop (which my good friend Nicole just shook her head and said ‘You’re gonna hate it’). It was everything I expected it to be: bad disco-pop music, bright lights, bright clothes and far too many of them. Luckily enough Amy worked me up to it by going into H & M first. With her assistance I even managed to find a couple of new things for my wardrobe. Give me a tiny boutique any day.
The highlight of the day was always going to be the Olympic Torch Relay Concert. How could it not be with people like Rod Stewart, Baby Spice and Will Young (Britain’s own Guy Sebastian)? Painful but fun is probably the best way to describe it. Amy and I had the bad fortune of standing directly behind the stage but we stuck it out for a while anyway. Seeing James Brown (in a smashing red suit) was fun, as was Ozzy Osbourne. But what made us laugh most was some very English lads who would sarcastically yell out ‘Who the fuck are you?’ every time someone like Baby Spice or Will Young came on stage with teenage girls screaming for them.
That night we headed off to Covent Garden to meet up with Simon who I haven’t seen since a bit after the Sydney Olympics. The only problem was that we forgot the name of the bar where the party was happening so we thought we’d take a guess. At sometime around midnight I get a call from Simon and realise that Retox, where we’d been sitting for a couple of hours, was not the place. We head on over to a place just around the corner called Garden Bar (or was it Gardening Bar?), wait in a small VIP line (because we were party guests) and then pay another ridiculous cover charge for the benefit of being able to drink in London past 11pm. I still can’t believe that a city like London still closes its pubs at 11pm.
Let me make a long story short. We somehow amused ourselves in the bar til a bit after 3am but didn’t manage to get home til after 5am because of just a little bit of difficulty with night buses. Getting in when the sun’s up isn’t all that nice but who can blame us when the sun rises at 4am.
I’m currently at Dublin airport using a computer with a very dodgy space bar so I must leave the rest of London for another entry. As soon as Justine’s plane gets in we’ll be off to Galway!