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London again. It's a bit like coming home really, it's certainly the closest thing we've had to a home in 2 months anyway. Only the whole place has changed. Just a week earlier we'd left London for our Scottish and Irish experience and it was still very much a city in early spring. We arrive back on the 7th of May to find summer has definitely arrived while we were away, galavanting around the highlands and watching atlantic sunsets.
We have some work to do, funnily enough, and this makes it seem even more homely. Because we are more or less making this trip up on the spot, the only concrete things being our international flights into and out of the big continents, a certain amount of haphazard and last minute planning has to happen before we embark on each leg. The next leg coming up is the USA, and all we really have is a few emails from people pledging a couch or a mattress (air!) without any firm dates.
So Lindo, who really enjoys sitting down for hours on warm sunny days in front of a Windows laptop (we're both Mac snobs and I'm using one now!), has
some two fingered typing to do. As for me, I've got so far behind on this bloody blog over the last couple of weeks due to my slow and pedantic technique, not being good at keeping things short and having too good a time...
So day one back in London begins like this: Back at Haydn and Stasa's flat in Herne Hill, Lindo, all set for a big day of sorting out dates and so forth, decides to give Peter Jenner a call. (Billy Bragg's manager, they met in NZ when Lindo supported him in Wellington). Peter says "come and meet me at 1pm".
Slight change of plan then. Looks like it's going to be me doing my blog catchup while Lindo walks through Hyde Park on a beautiful day to meet a man who used to manage the Clash and Pink Floyd.
Oh, I have some washing to do as well as my writing though.
This evening we have a dinner invite from a woman called Emily Corcoran, who has just completed a feature film called Sisterhood which uses one of the songs off "Show Pony" (Lindo's last album). It would have been relatively easy for us
to get to her house, but the trains were broken down again. London giving us a wee reminder of who's boss just as we're beginning to figure out how to get around.
The next day, Lindo decided to do some quick videos of 3 songs for Youtube, including "You can't tell me Nothing", his new favourite hip hop cover. He set himself up in the lounge with a hastily cobbled together backdrop and off he went. Well, it would have been quick except for the fact that it took a long time. I think the blame can be squarely placed on Microsoft's shoulders for that, with their fantastic operating system and companion programmes making something that should be relatively easy actually impossible. We had to give up trying to upload them in the end, until we got to this computer that I'm using now, which has very little to do with Bill Gates. The links to the videos are down below somewhere.
Our last day in London involved us freaking out a little bit. We were leaving Europe, which all of a sudden seemed to be quite a significant thing. So we packed our bags, tidied the lounge, took
the wet washing to the laundromat and then Lindo furiously emailed all the people he was meant to a couple of days ago while I tried to finish my epic Scotland/Ireland blog which was getting out of hand and turning into a bloody novel.
At least we had come up with a cunningl way to deal with our 4am checkin time at Heathrow though. Go to a BBQ (kindly put on by Emily and her partner Mark), have some drinks and stay there playing songs, talking and keeping them up until 3am, at which time we had to catch a double decker night bus all the way out to the airport. This ride was fairly alarming in that the bus was full and the driver was hooning. We got on at the Hammersmith Bus Station and I could already smell the brakes. Our fancy multi use Oyster bus/train cards didn't have enough money on them, we were out of change and so was the bus driver. My 20 pound note didn't go down well at all, and in the end I had to just tell him "we're not getting off this bus, keep the f***ing change!" There was only
one small problem with that, it was our last 20 quid...oh well.
When we get to the Lufthansa checkin, they have those nifty self checkin counters which speed up the process if you have e tickets, which we have. We just have to take our bags to the baggage drop off counter. Oh, but wait, there's a small problem, they want the address of our destination in order to get our boarding passes. We don't actually know where we are going, somewhere in New Jersey and the guy is called Chris, is that enough? No, they need a full address and a zip code. Now it's a big problem. Lindo and I have been up all night, we're certainly not at our sharpest and now we've got to find out where someone, who we've never met and is coming to JFK airport in a car to pick us up, lives. Oh Shit! We try making up an address, but that doesn't work, we look for an address in our Rough Guide to the USA book, but there are no Zip codes. We're getting panicky, starting to look like nervous Al Qaieda hijackers, when Lindo has an excellent idea and
decides that it's time to ring New Zealand, on the off chance that our good friend Cairan is in front of his computer and can give us the address and zip code of someone who we're staying with further down the line in Virginia. He is home! He sends Lindo the address and the problem goes away. It doesn't seem to matter what address you give them, as long as there is a zip code with it. A strange piece of red tape which must be responsible for more than a few skipped heart beats. I'm not sure who to blame, but whoever it is, you are EVIL!
Anyway, we're on our way to New York!
until then
Olza
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