DjMagra’s stuff ‘n’ stuff

I spent the weekend in London with Cella…had a great time, walked the legs off ourselves and spent a fortune, but it was all good! We arrived Friday evening, got to the hotel, lovely spot, out at Canary Wharf with a fabalous view overlooking the docklands and the Millennium Dome. As a fascinating aside, I read that the dome costs £100,000 a week just to keep it sitting there doing nothing!!

We went out Friday night to a fabalous bar / club around Picadilly called Zoo, really cool bar upstairs with cheesy tunes the whole night, and then a huge thumping club below it that we discovered far too late into the evening. The thing that struck us was, despite the size of the place, the number of people and the diversity of culture was how friendly everyone was. I know I’ve been on a rant about how horrible a place Dublin (Ireland!?!) is to live of late, but to find this in London was truly amazing. Cella pointed out that even when you bump into someone on the street (and that happens every 2 seconds!) that people apologise to you. Do that in Dublin and you’ll be thrown such an almighty glare as the person wanders down the street uttering obseneties in your general direction.

Saturday we heading in towards the London Eye (didn’t get into it due to the crowds) and wandered around lots of the city, before heading back to the hotel for a break and then out for dinner and more walking. Yesterday we went to the Tower of London to see the Crown Jewls….pretty amazing I must say!

So, all in all, it was a great weekend, striking things were a) the amount of people; b) how friendly everyone was; c) how hard it was to get into any clubs (they all have guest-lists); d) how cheap it was, even with the ~30% hit in the exchange rate it’s still cheaper than Dublin!!; and e) the lack of bins throughout the city.

London’s also in the news quite a bit of late due to the heightened terrorist alert (it’s now the top terrorist threat in Europe) and of course the visit of George Bush tomorrow. Security was huge all weekend, especially when they went to their second highest terror alert, with constant helicpoter activity overhead, armed police and army wandering the streets and constant passing of police cars and bikes at high speed…you’d think it would make you feel safer…but it really doesn’t!