On Sunday I travelled down to London to go to Anna's 21st birthday party. Although everything worked out correct in the end the trip down their was a bit hectic!
The bus I was going to catch to go to the station didn't turn up, the bus after it turned up about 5 mins late and drove straight past because it was full... eventually another bus came along - and although it wasn't going to drop me as near to the station as I would have wished it was going to get me to town quicker. This then involved a mad rush to the station - train was due to leave at 14.07, the bus dropped me off at about 2pm (and I still needed to get my tickets out of the magic ticket machine) - I guess you're thinking it's easy! Maybe you're right - he's a Google Map where the two points are (ish) and thank God I'm not a car!
Anyways, when I arrived the the ticket machine there was a little girl pratting around on it - grrr... decided the only option was to say "Are you using this?" in a rough voice - did the trick and luckily the machine didn't ask me for my long ticket number to be entered in (Anna tells me they've stopped asking for it now) which is funky.
Then it was a rush down to the platform and on to the train, which was inconviently at the wrong end of the platform. Phew made it!
The trip from Anna's to the venue was nice... mainly due to us not being able to hail a cab - it's not as easy as it seems on the films! After walking for a fair bit in the right general direction we gave up and waited for a taxi to appear - I'm glad looking at a map that my idea of just follow the road south to the until we can see St. Paul's would have worked perfectly.
The venue was the stupidly named "Perc%nto", nope, there's not a typo there, there really is a percent sign in the name - and the food was really good - it being a set menu meant that I ate things I prolly wouldn't have thought about picking if I'd had to pick something, which was good because it was worth having - even though there was no vegetables - other than a roast aubergine (eggplant) and no spuds!
Having intially being a bit worried that I'd only know Anna and Mark there it was good to see that most people (other than Anna's friends from school who were boring and just talked to themselves) were up for a laugh and a conversation.
Maybe it was that everyone there was so young(!?) but, erm, the DJ took the piss out of me for being the only one to know the moves to "Shake your tailfeather"! Crazy... I tell you! And hardly anyone knew what the songs were until the chorus... and the songs were cheesier than a Quattro Formaggio with extra cheese! Bah! Maybe it's my TEC influence...
It was funny at the end when Mark said to the DJ "Well at least you don't have much to put away!"... and the DJ said "You'd be suprised"... for them that understand... 4 FX on a goalpost and wedges on a stand. We had a little snigger about almost infinatly more sized rig that was being put in to the Sports Centre back in Nottingham.
After spending ages watching videos on YouTube and other sources we went to bed, well floor.
The trip back was less eventful (well for me, Anna managed to leave her train tickets at home!). The train was late, so all was well in the end - because was late they screwed up the reservation system - showing all seats as unreserved, which meant we got moved by people insisting on sitting in their seats (their right I guess) - this meant I got sat to a rather attractive girl - which made it awkward - well she managed to force herself to look out of the window pretty much all the time and if I were looking out of the window too and she looked around she'd quicky look out of the window again! Hmmm. Ah well. I decieded it wasn't a good idea to be one of the freaks on a train and start a conversation for absolutly no reason - I know how much I hate it when people do that to me! If something would have come up that would have forced us to talk that would have been great, but it didn't happen :(
Ah well.
In the evening I was in the pub and the Latin and Ballroom Soc came in for a pre-WeekOne meeting. Man, why didn't I do Ballroom dancing instead of TEC? Not knocking the women in TEC, obviously, that'd like be double standards, but maaaan :-)
Well that was quite a long post! Thank you Anna and her parents for organising a brilliant night out!