Leaving Edinburgh was a rather emotional experience. Living in the flat combined with Contiki, I’d spent almost 4 months with my house mates Anna and Andy. All of a sudden I wasn’t going to see them until God knows. As a final goodbye, we all drank a bottle of white star and hit up the bars in the very busy city. White Star is a “White cider”. It sounds quite fancy when said like that I like to think, but in reality, it costs about five Aussie dollars, is 7.5% and comes in a plastic 2L bottle. Due to it being made entirely of sugar and other nasties, it also makes you extremely hyperactive. In hindsight, it’s brilliant but probably the worst form of alcohol you could ever pump your body full of. From here, Callum, Lucy (friends from home) and myself were to make our way to Spain. To get there, we had to use the cheap portal that is London.
I hate London with a passion, no-one living in London is actually from England. That being said you'll still find plenty of diversity. Walking around you can pick out the Aussie's, Safa‘s, Indians, Americans, Kiwi's, Pakistani's...The list goes on and branches to every nationality and culture except the English. Ahh well, they're kind of annoying anyway.
Anyway, as I was saying, London truly is a hole, and I think I will only ever use it as a base point to go somewhere else due to how cheap and convenient it is to travel from there. People often tell me that I don’t like it simply because I don’t know where the good bits are and I haven’t spent enough time there. I’m quite happy for it to stay that way. If it's good for one more thing, London always has a large supply of good music around. This includes one of the best bands around at the moment, Tame Impala. Anyone that knows myself or Callum will know how important Tame Impala are to us. Every time I've ever seen Tame Impala, the audience has been huge, as with the stage, and I've always been blocked off to getting close to them by a huge fence. This time though, the stage was pretty small and you could touch them if you were at the front. Although it was a sold out show, the audience was still significantly smaller than what I am used to and were all crammed into a tiny room, which gave it a much more underground and intimate feel. I felt like I was part of the audience for The Beatles in the Cavern Club when they began to make it big. All in all, the show was outstanding, and although I'm pretty sure they were all high as a kite, they delivered a fantastic set and due to their new album being released not long ago, they played a lot of refreshing new songs which I've been dying to hear live.
After the show though, that was more of a highlight. It's not often many people in their lives will come face to face with their heroes. We’ve met the singer Kevin and the drummer Jay before at a performance in Townsville. I even managed to meet Jay while he was browsing the vinyls in a record shop in Fremantle. Both of these experiences blew my mind out of the park, but this experience was like no other. Before they even got on the stage, the bass player Nick stood right next to me and was bopping slightly to the music. I froze, freaked out, almost wet my pants and didn’t know what to do. Just as the first band finished, I gulped down my star-struck daze and tried to talk to him. Unlike the other two who were just normal chaps who enjoyed the odd yarn, Nick was a bizarre character who couldn’t stay on one topic for more than a minute. Despite this, he was still incredibly friendly and talking to him took away some of the mystique you saw on the stage, but it still made our opinion on the band 20 times better.
After the show, we only had one band member left on the list to check off. Dom plays a different instrument every time we see the band play and he never shows expression or even his face sometimes. To me, this makes him the most mysterious and most intriguing to meet. The entire band came out to have a few beers with the audience after the show, and sure enough he joined them after a while. A group of girls flooded him and for 30 minutes we had to simply watch and hope he didn’t go off with them. After what seemed to be a painful eternity, the girls finally left him alone with Jay and we moved in for the kill. After asking for a quick photo, he seemed more than eager to have a chat with us and was most curious to find out what they sounded like from our perspective. Dom was quiet and seemed to enjoy the low profile, so needless to say, he got on like a house on fire with Callum. To cut a long story short it was an awesome night out and the chaps were outrageously cool.
The next day consisted of looking for something to do while we waited for our plane. My old drama teacher from 10 years ago just happened to be living in London and since Lucy and her where rather good friends, we met up with her. On my last visit to Arminelle, I had short hair, was about 130cms tall, had big red lips and didn’t say peep. She was a little taken back this time around.
We all decided to grab some cheap chinese take-away and took a seat in a park with a couple beers. Just as we’d finished our food, some police officers turned up. Sitting in the park were the four of us and a couple pigeons. Apparently the officers could smell cannabis and OBVIOUSLY it was coming from us because I have dreadlocks and they couldn‘t see anyone else in the park. After questioning us (“So if I check that bag, I won’t find anything? Are you sure?”) for about 20 minutes, they decided to let us go without even searching us. Bloody idiots. To make the whole situation even more bizarre, it’s still illegal to drink in public in the UK, and all four of us were drinking beer, but they decided to turn a blind eye on it because we “seemed like nice people”.
Later in the evening, we jumped on bus to the airport, slept in the airport until 5am and then caught our Boeing-737 all the way across the water to the Spanish capital, Madrid.
More details of the trip to Spain in the next couple days!!
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