And Now For Something Completely Different...

A two-fer!

Part I: School Sponsored Pub Crawl

Just a quick diddy on the USSU's (student union) Fresher's Pub Crawl. I guess because drinking in Britain is such an important activity with very little negative stigma attached to it, it makes perfect sense for the school to host such an event. I mean, hey who thinks that bringing hundreds of freshman to bars all over town and then ending the night by booking out the 4 busiest clubs right on the beach isn't a good idea?? haha. Quite like my previous post on drinking here, I found the school sponsored pub crawl shocking, but of course I signed up. Great way to meet people and learn where in town is fun to go. Once on the buses we got the 411 on the evening; we would be split up into different wristband color groups, herded around town by Resident Advisors and Student Union leaders, and ultimately be dropped off on the beach and have any of 4 clubs to go to until the buses came to get us between 2 and 3am! A-MAZING! (i mean amazing that this is school sponsored -- days later I am still in awe of this)

My favorite part of the evening besides meeting all the international students (we got our own group) was the location of the clubs. It was similar to Mission Beach or Santa Monica in the sense of the layout of the beach. Ocean-Rocks (no sand)-boardwalk-buildings. Except that instead of houses it was 4 clubs. Pretty cool to go inside dance to 90's hits and jackson 5 (very big here - oh michael haha) and then walk outside and be on the beach to cool off.


Ok, Part II: London (Mis)Adventures

This past Friday and Saturday I spent time in London with Katie (my flatmate from UCSC) and her boyfriend Jesse (from UCSB-hes studying in London for the year). Friday night we went to a play called '39 Steps' in the west end (Picadilly Circus!). It was in a beautiful and very quant theater, and it was hilarious! We were cracking up the entire time. Afterwards we wandered around and marveled at the mass amounts of tourists and lights. We ultimately ended up at an Irish pub called Dublin's because of the huge flyers advertising live music. This is by far the biggest pub I've been to. 2 floors of dance music and food, and the best part, a 3rd floor room just for the band. It was a great Irish band, all guys in their 40's and 50's. The whole second part of their set was dedicated to covers of currently popular music with some lynard skynard mixed in. Great place!

The "(mis)" begins here. At 1 am we were ready to head back to Jesse's dorm on the other side of London. However, the tube stops running at about midnight even on Fridays. Sooo "We'll talk the number 25 bus" says Jesse. No problem. Except that the 25 picks up absolutely nowhere near Picadilly Circus. Woops! So we get on a bus that we think will get us to the 25 and end up going 25 minutes in the wrong direction. Thankfully we get dumped off the bus at a stop that DOES have a bus that runs to Jesse's. So ten minutes later we are on an hour long busride to his place. This ride is complete with drunk Londoners discussing the evening, lost foreigners, and random and rather intoxicated individuals trying to have civilized conversations with very sober and very tired americans (aka me, katie, jesse). I had the privelage of speaking with an Aussie boy dressed to the nine about why he had moved to London; "Well there's this little game you may have heard of called cricket..." he starts. "Well I'm actually quite good, so I've come here to play professionally..." he continues. I almost barf and think do you ACTUALLY get girls with that line?!? Regardless, he was quite pleasant and clean so he didn't creep me out. Eventually at about 3 am we successfully made it back to Jesse's and all slept better than we had in days.

Saturday was the Tate Modern and some fabulous Greek food on the Thames. Not very exciting, but a fabulous day.

School's started. So far so good. I'll be posting shortly about that. It'll make for a good one once I get a bit more material.

Until then, Cheers!


PICTURES ARE UP!