The Church

Another week has rolled by, with nothing overly exciting happening. Friday night I caught up with Nicki, from our Croatia tour, for a beer after work. Then we just chilled at home, had a few drinks and headed on to bed. Saturday morning we were up early for breakfast and then headed to the TNT Travel Show. This is where we went a but nuts last year and booked our Egypt and Croatia tours. This year we were not looking at booking anything, we have pretty much settled on our itinerary for the summer. The main reason was actually quite boring, we wanted to speak to the shipping countries about sending some stuff home in May. The highlight of the show was actually just roaming around and chatting to our mates, many of which were working on the stands. There was some old and current housemates, the Pampalona crew, our Croatia tour guide and Croatia passengers as well as MacBackpackers the company we toured Scotland with. We walked home from the travel show, through Hyde Park. After some lunch and a nap it was time to head out to Hammersmith. Chris from Pampalona was having his birthday at a pub. We were looking forward to this as we haven’t seen many of the Pamps crew for a long time. We had a good night, drinking cocktails and catching up with the guys that are still around London. At one stage Christine and the barman had a ‘miscommunication’ on the 2 for 1 cocktails, and she ended up ordering us 8 cocktails in one visit to the bar, damn English-Australian language barrier!

We were up early again on Sunday. Jacinda, also from our Croatia trip, is heading home to NZ. As a farewell party she was heading to The Church. It’s a bit of a messy bar, aimed at Aussies and Kiwis, and is only open 4 hours a week, midday to 4pm on Sunday. It is one of those things where you’re not really a Aussie living in London until you have experienced it, so we thought we should visit before we leave. Mel and Alex from DC came with us and we were meeting 6-8 other there. All of us dressed in Doctors Scrubs uniforms. The afternoon went really well, lots of drinks, entertainment and bogan rock music. At 4pm when it closes everyone piles out into the street and onto buses headed for the Shepherds Bush Walkabout, conveniently the Aussie Bar not too far from our place. We managed to stumble home at the reasonable time of about 9.30pm, dreading having to get up for work in the morning.