Hello Ireland

The beginning of my Irish tour was a week cavorting around Dublin with my friend. But to get there was a bit of a mission. It required me leaving my little London flat at 2am in order to make a 6:30am flight from Stanstead. The highlight of that journey, making a racquet over the cobbled streets of Knightsbridge with my suitcase at 3am.

In Dublin, some sightseeing was in order. Arriving at 8am, hungry, tired, (but unable to check into accommodation) and knowing nothing about Dublin, I fixed myself up with some Macca’s breakfast, a coffee and a sightseeing bus map and proceeded along the route by foot.

Final days of Summer

An offer came, in the form of an Irish adventure, so I took it, but had some last minute summer London things to tick off my list. Cue a big two weeks to end August. From nights out in Hoxton, Covent Garden and Battesea, to Tate Modern, coffee at St. Pauls, a failed attempt to go to a pre-Olympics basketball tournament resulting in a leisurely Sunday afternoon sightseeing walk along the Thames North Bank, a visit to the BBC Proms at Royal Albert Hall, a night and morning dance session at Ministry of Sound, a play at Shakespeare’s Globe, attendance at the infamous ‘Church’ on a Sunday afternoon and last but not least the Notting Hill Carnival (shout out to Steve on his short trip around Europe for catching up with me for this one, and for the tim tams). I’m glad to say I got out of the last one alive after a near crushing episode. We got there early before the crowds and wondered what all the fuss was about. Throughout the day it picked up and at about 4pm the crowds were becoming thick. We decided it would be a great idea to head up the extremely crowded street against the flow of the parade to check out a couple more floats before we headed off. Amazingly it turned out to be not such a good idea. After 20 metres, we soon became separated, another ten metres and we found ourselves turning back, it felt like being caught in a rip in the ocean. Suddenly, one of the parade truck’s on the other side of the road decided it would be good idea to stop moving, stop their music and tell everyone in the immediate vicinity that those wanting to move up and down the street should make their way to the pavement. Well done people!! This caused a mass amount of people to move to the pavement, where we happened to be, and the truck who hadn’t moved on yet was taking up vital extra space. So the final result was two minutes of almost panic by everyone. I was so jammed in I could not even put my hands down by my side. Several people around had started to panic, to whom I tried to calm down, thankfully no one started pushing and eventually I made it out of there. Reunited with my friends where we had started from about ten minutes earlier, we all quickly left Notting Hill, satisfied we had got close enough to the action and called it a day.

Tattoo! Edinburgh style.

DC spent the weekend up in Edinburgh attending several Fringe Festival
comedy events as well as the Royal Edinburgh Military Tattoo. Having
grown up with my parents watching it on TV every Xmas it was somewhat
surreal to finally witness it. Great wknd, great company, great city
and even the weather decided to play nice.

250 beers reached

Beer #250 is Cairngorm Stag Premium Ale, rated 8.2

London riots

Just to let you know DC is ok and the rioting/looting did not happen near me, at least a couple of miles away.

Thierry Henry vs Aresnal

Witnessed the return of Aresnal's prodigical son Henry (On-ri) playing for the New York Red Bulls against his former home team. He got a bigger cheer than Arsenal! And a bigger one than Aresnal at the end of the game too, but that apparently isn't hard as the crowd turned on their own team for losing the tournament by kicking an own goal with 5mins to go. Value for money for me, not so for the other 50,000 odd people though.