the adventures of pinkaholic girl

4am London

I caught up with Niall tonight, which was great fun. I haven't seen him in almost a year! He has facial hair now! I should have taken a photo so all you kids at home can see what he looks like now.

We went to ping pong for dinner - a yum cha restaurant that serves cocktails (Brilliant!) The taste wasn't too bad, but it was odd eating yum cha for dinner. And you have to order it from a menu, it doesn't come around on trolleys.

After dinner we went in search of a pub, but didn't find any that were open. London has some archaic licencing laws meaning that most pubs stop serving drinks at 11pm. This forces a whole bunch of inebriated people onto the streets between 11 and 12, and makes bars open after 11pm very, very popular places. After much effort, we found such a bar somewhere south of Leicester square. The place was packed! I had a raspberry champagne cocktail and chocolate martini - both very tasty.

The real adventure of the night came at 2am, when that bar also stopped serving alcohol. We decided to call it a night, and I went in search of the magical N87 bus that would take me all the way back to Clapham Junction. The problem was, I was in the wrong part of town. And it's very, very hard to find a bus when you're not along the route it takes to get to its destination.

I was very reluctant to catch a cab because of the expense, even if by some miracle we found one in the city on a saturday night. So Niall and I eventually hopped on a bus to Victoria station (thanks Niall!) - at least it was going south - in the hope that my bus would be somewhere along that way. We ran into a guy who seemed to have memorised the bus routes of southwest london and was randomly advising people where to go. He told me to catch another bus to Vauxhall, and my magical N87 bus would be waiting there to take me home. He was right! I left Niall at Victoria and by the time I got back to Clapham Junction it was 4am. Everything was so quiet I saw a fox rumaging through garbage (I can't believe they have foxes in urban areas).

Anyway, that was my exciting London adventure for this weekend. From now on, I'm always going to look up the bus routes on the internet before going out!

posted by d @ 5:02 am