Parlez-vous Anglais?

So Johno was kicked out of his house for Saturday night so that the girls could have a Dirty Dancing Night, (No that doesn’t mean they hired strippers…..or does it?) see the girls blog. Quite happy with this we set about organizing a lad’s poker night…That was until we realized that France was only an hour or 2 drive away. So after pointing & laughing at the girls, we all jumped into the trusty Saab & headed off in a general Southwest direction in search for beaches, shenanigans & women with spiders trapped under their armpits.
As we got to Dover it started raining & it was not to stop until we got to Dover again 24 hours later.
We would have made it to France in ½ an hour if it wasn’t for a car load of Germans in front of us that didn’t understand how the 30sec process of paying money for goods & services worked. (In this incident a train ticket) They somehow managed to draw a financial operation that man has been doing since the time of the Greeks out to nearly 20 minutes while we sat behind them watching all the other queues dwindle & getting louder & louder in our dislike of being stationary.

On the Train under Several millions tons of water

We made it to France…Nice place, it looks like Kent, apart from they drive on the wrong side of the road & I can’t read the signs (Remind me again why I took 3^rd form Maori instead of French). La Touquet looked like a funky little village so we decided it was the lucky winner for billeting our sparkling personalities for the night.
Unfortunately it was a bank holiday in France making it nigh imposable to book 5 beds at 5pm Saturday evening. We were informed of this by a receptionist of one of the hotels who I think was trying to live up to all the negative stereotypes of ignorant French people. Luckily Aaron spotted a hostel just as we were scoping out dry doorways we could use for the night & although she said the 5 man standing in her lobby wearing hoodies made her nervous she did offer us a couple of fine fine rooms.
Unfortunately by the time we were ready to go investigate the town the sun had almost set so we had to settle for investigating the local restaurants & nightclubs. No one else wanted escargot & I wasn’t about to pay €25 for 12 shriveled snails….Next time I promise. Although I did have a pot of garlic mussels that could hold their head high next to the Kaitaia mussels from the Grey Lynn festival, (the mussels by which all others are judged!) even if they were marginally bigger than pipis.

I would just like to point out that I was doing the guns not the fingers

After knocking back a ‘le giraffe’ with our meal which is a massive beer – About 4 jugs – with a tap on the bottom for easier drinking…If you ask me it looked like a giant bong from my Uni days. We then strolled to a funky wee bar for some foosball & more beers but after our massive dinners sitting down was just putting us to sleep. So after some fairly direct questions to one of the bar staff, we learnt where the real nightlife was & toddled off in that direction. The club we found ourselves in seemed quite cool, they defiantly poured a good Vodka/Lemonade but no one was dancing normally, they were all salsa dancing…strange.
That was pretty much it for the night & the weekend, big ups to Chris for the driving…especially Sunday morning when we were all zombies. Also cheers to Dave for remembering to actually use his camera.

Cat Empire

This is just a quick note about going to see the Cat Empire last Friday. I’ve been listen to them for the last few years as they are quite big in the land down under. They’re a really cool jazz/funk/rap group from Melbourne that reminds me of the old Kiwi band SuperGroove. I was going to go see them last year but ended up having a better offer & missing them. So when I got the opportunity to see them this year I was first in line – Actually I didn’t know they were touring & Georgia got the tickets. Any whoo….WOW!! The core of the band is 6 guys. Felix (Vocals/percussion), Harry (Vocals/Trumpet), Will (Drums), Jamshid (Decks), Ollie (Keyboard) & Ryan (Bass), but in concert they also grabbed 3 of the horn players from the opening act ‘The Ross Irwin Soul Special’ & they got a hell of a lot more Jazzy! Ross’ crew did a pretty good job warming the crowd up but from the moment the empire took the stage untill when they left about 2 hours latter they owned the venue & everyone in it. There was every thingfrom instrument solos, to just letting the crowd sing for ½ a minute to two chicks coming on stage & Scu-dee-bobed for about 5 minutes (You know Shi-ba-bop-ba-dop-ba-bing). Absolutely awesome & fully got me wanting to get back into seeing live gigs…& more jazz!

This was taken by someone in the Cat Empire at one of there 2 London shows…So let’s say that’s me Ground floor back left (from the bands point of view) with their hands up ….see me?
Afterwards I popped over to my flat mate’s birthday drinks (Which he was having on the other side of London to our flat?) & was reminded what it’s like being around plastered people when you’re not…so set about rectifying the problem. Later we invited a whole bunch of mates back to our place & realized we only had 5 cans of beer in the fridge & all the off licenses were closed! Lucky for stashed bottles of liquor & all night Kebab shops that only sell lemonade in cans. Sorry to anyone in the Willesden Green area who wanted a sprite to go with their Kebab last Friday night. All in all a very very cool night.