The Book of Sifty

London Eye 7:37AM

Okay so last weekend? Not super exciting. On Friday night went out to dinner with one of my mothers friends. She's been visiting her daughter who turns out to live about 10 minutes walk from where I am. (That's a pretty freaky coincidence, since much less than 1% of London's population lives within that distance!). She took me out for lunch earlier in the week to this very funky little Latin American caf', think burritos, corn bread etc. Hmm. On Friday I went over to their place and we headed out with her daughter, her partner, his brother and some other friends to dinner. They spent the entire night stressing about whether it was a good restaurant or not. Personally I thought it was cheap, the service was wicked, the food yummy and served in decent portions. Besides my mother's friend insisted on paying and there was plenty of red wine flowing -so I thought it was a pretty good night all and all.

Saturday was a quite one with myself, Marcus and co sitting around till 3am watching dodgy music videos and drinking. (Of course day light saving meant it was really like 2am.. ;) Sunday we tried to go on the London Eye, a massive Ferris wheel like thing. This has these giant bubble cars that you ride in, with about 25 other people and it takes about 30 minutes or so to go around. We failed totally since there was a 50 minute queue. Ended up in a pub looking up at it instead. Then it was over to Westminster and another pub for dinner.

Brixton Academy 7:38AM

So we headed off to the 'Hard House Academy First Birthday Party' at the Brixton Academy. This is a pretty major event, with about 5000 people in attendance. We turned up at 1am so were pretty surprised to get tickets. Walking through the doors and into the lobby of this wicked old theatre was quite an experience, there was a dance floor set up and a huge number of people, upstairs to the coat check, into the mezzanine of the theatre and there was another dance floor. I thought it was pretty cool and was quite stoked we finally made it in after about our 2 hour saga trying to find this other place. I wasn't totally into the music, but it was such an intense sight, so many people, most very dressed up in all sorts of bizarre outfits, loud music and lights that to say I was pretty excited would be an understatement. Still more was to come. From the coat check it was into the dress circle seats, where we were looking out over the main theatre and the main dance floor. My god!. All the seating had been removed, in its place, flanked by enormous speaker stacks, bathed in strobes and smoked was this heaving sea of people. Whoah.

So pretty cool night in the end. As I say the music wasn't entirely my bag, but still all good fun. Oddly about 75% of the people were from NZ and Aus, probably since its NZ promoter crew and the series has a big following among people from NZ who have missed the whole dance music scene in NZ. In fact I met a girl I used to go to primary school with!

Anyway got home about 8am after a bit a nightmare of a queue to get our coats back. I've been sharing the lounge room at the current flat, theres now a NZ girl on the other couch. So it was after a four hours of lo-quality sleep that I was dragged off to the pub for lunch. Spent most of the afternoon there over a couple of very tasty pints.

Hard House 7:38AM

Weekend before was far more interesting. In usual style it will be write up of going out, yet again. Friday Amanda from work dragged me out to some club where one of her friends was promoting a new club night. This was more a bar than a club, so got home early at about 3am, after a bit of an interesting wander through some more colourful bits of Covent Garden and Soho.

Had a good chat with Farmgirl on Saturday morning, good to hear her again.

That afternoon Marcus, Poh and Frayer (sp? - Dutch girl) and I went down the road to Elephant and Castle. Marcus and I were both in dire need of a haircut and after my ongoing saga of bad hairdressing incidents here I was quite impressed by Marcus's introduction: a '7, no appointment, old school mens barber. Although not the best haircut it was quick and seems to do the trick. Then it was off to the Imperial War Museum. Very impressive place, with in depth displays and unbiased footage of every major war since 1900. That did nothing but make me more of a pacifist, and remind me how lucky we are in to live in the time we do, although the whole Afghanistan thing is a bit more unsettling looking at some recent history, but that's another story.

After that it was off to this Thai place we spotted on the way there for dinner and stiff drink after the Museum. Thai food over here isn't huge, so it was pretty wicked to find a decent place with genuine food and good staff. The plan was head home, change, shave etc then out to meet Craig and a group of his mates in Convent Garden. Craig was there, but all his friends were at dinner still and were supposed to catch us up in some club in Mayfair.

Now I've talked about the cheapest street on the monopoly board right? Well Mayfair I think is one of the most expensive. By a long way, In real life its strangely so. After wandering around the streets for a while trying to find this place we discovered that it was shut, and had been for about three months! So we changed tack and tried to find a random decent looking club based on the size of the queue outside. This didn't work either, since what clubs there were had a people climbing out of BMW and 911s, dressed up with bodyguards and chauffeurs, and besides it sounded like they played pretty crappy music anyway. Then Craigs mates all piked!

We made a split second decision and caught the last train south to Brixton. The plan was at least we could afford drinks there, and with at least three good clubs, and one major club night happening, we should be able to get into something surely.

Brixton and Mayfair couldn't be more different, infact stepping out of the tube its hard to believe they are the same city. Brixton doesn't even feature on the Monopoly board, its more diverse population wise, and so unlike Mayfair which is a bit of ghost town, with empty footpaths (yet huge traffic jams of tossers in nice European cars driving to clubs!)