Laurent Garnier

This is London and besides the British capital, it is also the worlds financial capital and... the capital of clubbing. So last night Laurent Garnier came over to play an olympic 8-hour set at the end.
We couldn't let that occasion pass by so me and my Dutch buddy, Max, went down there to find ourselves in a 45 minute queue to get in. Well ok, it wasn't raining nor cold and we already had some drinks so alright, we stood and watched the crowd around us. One lesson for next time; buy advance tickets well in advance so we can take the short queue.
You know, the English just love to queue, they're famous for it and it is true. Everywhere they form these lines and go and stand civilized one after the other, and whoo they who try to jump the queue. The bouncers see it all and or they pick you out of the line, or they'll just let you wait the whole line, only to send you back to the end when you taught you were finally about to get in (it's so much fun to see them being sent back!).

So after our long wait we finally got our full body search, could donate a vast amount at the poor cassier and could go down in the end! So there he was, the world famous deejay Laurent Garnier, approx. earning my whole savings in one single night. Laurent was playing great, a wide range of styles from trad. house and techno over rock-inspired pounding music to drum & bass and very jazzy stuff. You could see he was in the mood and we, 2 meters from him, were sweating in the masses, going where Laurent guided us.

One serious down-side: way too much testostero in the venue, it was about a ratio of 1 to 4, and most of the girls that were there... well, they could as well have stayed home as far as I was concerned.

That's the problem with the well-known clubs and a famous deejay. So we'll have to find better next time and go more underground.


Friday evening we had a drink offered by the school where we had a chat with the professors and our fellow students. After the necessary glasses of -fairly decent I must say- South African LSE house wine, we ended up looking for a place to go.
So first we, some 15 IR students, followed a french guy who claimed to know 'a cool place'.
I should have known, never trust a frenchman on music taste or for your nightlife. He took us to Covent Garden, seriously overprized and you can't get more touristic in London. I hope the guy will discover another side of London over the year.

After the group thinned out Sebastian (from Berlin) proposed to go to Bethnal Green, an area in East London that's coming up the last couple of years. I have been there already a couple of times and I really dig the area. People from Berlin are a lot more trustworthy for your nightlife. Bethnal Green kinda reminds of Berlin though. A bit rough, a higher cool factor and more underground. That's the way Sebastian and I like it.
So we took the lead and took Alex (americanized frenchman), Matts (americanized Swedish guy) and a Norwegian girl over there. Big mistake, 4 guys and one girl, never do that again in London. You can't get in any decent place (at least without entrance fee), "only couples" is the answer we got at the 'mother bar' (also here) and they see that in a very narrow sense. Only people from Liverpool are worse off, they can't get in anyway.
We didn't feel like paying 10 quid for a venue that we didn't know so we ended up in some place playing rock and old skool whitemen hiphop. The gig was fair enough, except for our Swedish friend, until Sebastians bag was suddenly gone.
Fuck!!! There were thieves operating in the joint. I had put my jacket on a bench besides me and some guy tried to go tru my pockets as well. Nothing worth taking but anyway I spotted him and he came up with some lousy story about his bag being nicked and he was trying to find his stuff.
Yeah right! But Sebastians bag was still missing, nothing in there except some books that are worthless for anybody but mean a fortune for an IR student. And luckily his iPod was in his jacket.

To shorten up the story, we turned the place upside down but didn't find the bag. Then we waited for people to come out and asked people with a big bag if we could see in it. They guy who I saw going through my pockets earlier got thrown out after being caught doing the same in some girls purse. At 3am the place closed and we watched everybody coming out. Finally, Sebastians bag was found at the other end of the place. Clearly the thieves saw there was nothing in there besides books and left it there.
No need to say how relieved Sebastian was.