Last days’ news…

I’ve been awfully busy lately. I’m not complaining though. I spent most of my weekend outdoors and I loved it, especially with the weather being so nice. On Friday evening we went to listen to a soprano friend singing Handel arias in a nice church of Eastern London.

I missed the protest at the ‘John Snow’ pub in central London though because of that. I read that around 300 couples went outside the pub and kissed for three hours. The homophobic pub owner had closed the pub some hours earlier, but the protest went on anyway! I believe that if he had been at least a bit smart, he could have tried to play along and offer drinks to the protesters or something to try to avoid the humiliation… You simply can’t run a pub when incidents like this happen, especially in the Soho area, it’s so infuriating… As MadeInScotland suggested, we can help now simply close the pub…

Anyway, after the arias I decided to take JJ and go out. We hadn’t been out dancing for ages. So, we decided to go to Soho, have a late dinner and go to ‘bar-code’. I hadn’t been there in ages. I don’t think it’s the nicest place to go, although I can’t really put my finger on what I don’t like about it. Anyway, after a couple of drinks we had our fun. It’s so funny checking people’s behaviour and body language in gay clubs! Apart from some normal nice people, you have the sugar daddies advertising their latest trophies, you have the junkies in their own world seeing butterflies in the air, there are the escorts trying to get new clients or the club queens with the big egos and attitudes. It’s all so entertaining…

A traffic sign in Soho

dancing

Saturday started a bit late (after mixing rum and vodka shots the night before). We did however decide to take advantage of the great weather and walk along the river. After a long walk we ended in ‘Tate Britain’. I am not sure why, but I hadn’t visited that particular gallery before. I’ve been to ‘Tate Modern’ so many times but not the other one… It was a very nice day out that we finished with a nice dinner in a South-African restaurant and watching ‘Source Code’ at the cinema. The movie was actually quite good.

Sunday was ‘London Marathon’ day! So we went to see and cheer for the runners! We found a nice spot close to the ‘Embankment’ which was the 40th kilometer of the route! The place was full of people and the atmosphere was amazing. Since we weren’t that far from the finish line, we could see how most of the runners were struggling to keep up and we tried our best to help them. Most runners had their names written on their t-shirts so we tried to call them personally for encouragement.

It was very funny to spot people running with weird costumes. There was a group of runners dressed like Snow-white and the 7 dwarves, smurfs, Big Bird, a guy running with a real washing machine on his back, a guy dressed like Natalie Portman from ‘Black Swan’, a guy dressed in a wedding dress with a carbon picture of Kate Middleton on his face etc. Unfortunately, I wasn't quick enough or with a good view to take pictures of all the funny costumes.

a sexy police officer?

human toilet? (with someone collapsing on the side unfortunately)

Mankini?

Big Bird?

Near the finish line! So many people!

It was totally amazing to see how they were trying to keep going when their pain was so obvious. Some people couldn’t even walk properly and they were limping. Some other people were bleeding, especially from their nipples, and still going. We had a couple of runners getting awful leg cramps in front of us but still getting up and trying to run. Two other runners simply collapsed and had to be carried away.

In any case however it was all very inspiring. You could see how mind could win over pain and that if you really put your mind into it, there was no stopping some people…