Another Spare Moment

Okay, so I never actually finished the blog last Thursday, and now it’s Sunday, and I’ve managed to find a spare moment to write some more. We’re in the living room watching The Mighty Boosh and Laura’s making some swt, swt shortbread. I’ll start where I trailed off last time.

So I was meant to be going out for Indian that night in Brick Lane with Laura and her friend, and for this reason I did. On the way we went to a small English pub, where there were as many people (men) drinking outside on the street as there were inside. Then we made our way to Brick Lane and on arriving were ‘attacked’ by restaurant workers trying to coax us into their restaurants with promises of discounts and alcohol. Laura’s friend Beth managed to negotiate 25% off and one and a half pints of cider for each of us. Score! Dinner was great (cheap!) and we got drunk and made our way home. I’ll make sure to go back there many times.

The next day was Australia Day. I was a little apprehensive about our plans to spend the day in a Walk-a-bout (chain of Australian pubs), but that’s what was organized and we could at least listen to the hot 100 which had been recorded and was being played back. We arrived at 10.30. The pub was quite empty but still thick with unsettling patriotism. Over the course of the day, the pub packed out and it all became more and more difficult to bare. Charissa had arrived during the day and at about 4pm we moved downstairs where we could actually hear the countdown and people cared about it slightly more. At #25 they made the predictable and frustrating decision to stop the countdown, play some painful Australian pub rock and elongate the whole situation. Charissa and I figured this would be a great opportunity for her to show me the nearby Leicester Square, Picadilly Circus, Soho etc.

On apprehensively returning to the Walk-a-bout I was slightly relieved to see a giant line to get back in. The line wasn’t moving. We waited there for a while before Charissa went to check out another pub in the area that was also playing the countdown. Half an hour later she returned, I’d move about 1m in the line and so we (with Laura) headed to a much less painful bar with more levels, nooks and crannies than the other place had bogans but also spare tables and chairs! We sat, chatted, Charrissa’s friend Peter joined us, drank and vaguely cared about the fact that Muse beat Silverchair by 12 votes.

At about 8.30pm Peter took us a nearby club called Trash Palace were we drank, chatted and dance and didn’t make it to bed till 4am after a long bus ride. I was more tired than I’ve ever been. I’d started to get sleepy around 10 hours earlier. Next day I woke at 2.30pm and made my way home on the tube and spent the rest of the evening in a daze, making shortbread and not noticing when Laura spoke to me.

Monday morning was catching up on organizational crap and webcamming with my family. Monday arve I caught up with Monica who had finally gotten over her jet slag for some fashion shopping and English pub meal. Monday evening I caught up with Peter and went for coffee (well, Mocha) in Soho.

Tuesday was fucked. Woke up at 12.35 and remembered I had a 1.30 booking for an ‘induction’ info meeting and bank account sign up. I leapt out of bed, threw on my clothes, raced to Laura’s work to pick up my passport and then onto FirstContact (where the ‘meething’ thing was) just 20mins late. The whole thing was really painful. The room looked like a uni lecture room and, I felt like a uni student – too tired to concentrate. But two and a half painful hours later I had a free umbrella (ella…ella) and an HSBC bank account.

The rest of the evening was painful. I walked around Oxford St waiting for Peter to finish work feeling like I was going to collapse from exhaustion. I went home after a couple of hours at Starbucks and that’s where I spent the next 72hours trying to recover.