We're with the band

Wow, I suck. I haven't made a post in so long. I figured I really needed to make a post before I left for Milan this weekend. (we're leaving tomorrow at 6:40, aka the ass crack of dawn). I've also had jam packed full weeks/weekend so maybe it's about time to start typing about what's been going on.

Well, last weekend was Yasin's birthday. We started the weekend off early with St. Patricks day on Thursday. First of all, I thought that St. Patricks day was going to be crazy in London. Ok, not as crazy as NYC, but still they were going to celebrate. Did I see one person wear green as I walked to work? No. Was barely anybody celebrating? Yes. When I wished people at work a Happy St. Pattys day, they looked at me like I had 3 heads. What?! This country is right next to Ireland, where the holiday originated. Where is the fun of drinking all day?...
We wanted to go to O'Neills, the typical Irish Pub in the middle of SoHo, but honestly on a weekend the line is around the corner and it's about an £8 cover charge. When we got there, the streets were packed and it was utter chaos (want to know why? Becasue it was all Americans and creepy Brits who wanted to meet the Americans). So we ended up waiting in line for Waxys Little Sister in Chinatown. (A Chinese pub...on St Patricks Day. Oh the culture.) Laurens friends were visiting from America and the entire time they were txting one of the bartenders at O'Neills trying to get us in. Finally a bunch of Brits told us to come outside and they told us we were going out. Yasin said she wasn't going anywhere unless she was VIP. They started laughing at her like she was crazy but they told us to follow them. This is where London differs from America...we just did. We ended up at Zoo Bar, which is on of those London staples: you go there once or for a quick fix of a night but you really don't want to go LETS GO TO ZOO BAR TONIGHT! It's full of creepy Italian men and trashy girls. There was a line around the corner but somehow or another, we got on the VIP line and walked right in. We got inside and went downstairs where the DJ was playing a really good mix. We stayed there for a really long time. I got seperated from the group for a while and when I got reunited with them, they found themselves a corner little room where I guess Africa had it's own DJ. People were tribal dancing (I am not making this up, I have pictures to prove it) and everyone was getting down to old school rap and African music. Begin night one of getting home at 4am.
Start night 2 of Yasin's birthday weekend. We decided to go to 93 Feet East on Brick Lane, where every Friday is Free. The last time I went they had 2 rooms: one room with electronica music and one room of live music. We got there this time and the first room we stepped into was older people (and by older we mean the above 30 crowd) and they were playing 'remixed' Michael Jackson. It wasn't exactly what we were looking for. We went into the other room and Deathwish Disco was bumpin' some dubstep. We decided to get a drink to start the countdown to midnight, when all of a sudden this guy bumped into us. We ended up talking to him the entire night...AND he was a Brit! His name was Michael and he is a analyst broker something with Russian money and he bought us drinks all night and a bottle of Rose for Yasin's birthday at midnight! I was so happy we made a friend and he was so sweet.
The next day we headed to Oxford where we were determined to see where the Great Hall of Harry Potter was filmed. We spent the morning walking around taking in how perfectly cliche Oxford is. We finally went into one of the stores and asked where we can embarrassingly see the Harry Potter hall. It was an Oxford bookstore and the guy behind the counter laughed at us and said 'it's at Trinity College, but you guys are going to be disappointed'. Heads held high, we marched straight into Trinity College and began taking pictures. They had a sign pointing to the dining hall and we opened the doors expecting magnificence and it was....well...very short of magnificent. It was set up like the Great Hall but it was a lot tinier. We thought that it was just movie magic that made it so grand so we decided to start taking tourist pictures. Happy about making fools of ourselves, we headed back into Oxford to explore Oxford Castle (the people in Oxford didn't even know they had a castle. It's a well hidden secret. And actually, the mother of Robin Hood was kept there and escaped on ice skates. How cool! Or at least that's what our tour guide told us). We spent a lot of time there taking silly pictures as well. When it was finally time to catch our bus back, we were exhausted. Plus, we had to rest up for our Camden pub crawl we had tickets to. The Camden pub crawl we did was the pubs in Camden 'off the beaten path'. It was led by this rocker guy with a bleach blonde mullet and who at one point got too drunk and started hitting on me and made me really uncomfortable, but it was too funny to stop him. For 8 pounds we got free entry/no queues at all the pubs, plus a free shot at each place and drink specials. It was quite the deal. Each place was different and unique and typical 'Camden'. We only ended up going to 5/6 places though because at the 5th place, the Barfly, there was a live band playing. We got our free shot and as Yasin and I made our way up to the front of the crowd I said to her, "I want to meet the band". So, we did. And we ended up hanging out with them all night. We bought alcohol outside the pub and drank it on the streets and then went back inside and hung out and danced until almost 4am, where then they came back to our flat and we hung out and talked and had a giant sleepover. Yes, we fit almost the whole band into our tiny closet of a room.