Here's to Feeling Good All The Time...: Bringing New York to Europe

Apologies for not having posted in quite some time. The last 10 days or so have been pretty busy as I have been entertaining 3 of my friends from New York - Amit, Neil and Vishal (nicknamed Poo, Fake, and PB, respectively – don’t ask).

I should also caveat this posting by pointing out that this is the PG version. Well, probably PG-13 actually. There’s a new saying – what happens on guys-only trips in London and Spain, stays in London and Spain. At least for a non-password protected blog website.

The guys arrived on Friday morning, and the madness started immediately. You knew it was gonna be a crazy trip when Poo had lost his paper plane ticket and PB had lost his passport beofre I even got home from work on Friday. The weekend ended up being a par-for-the-course NY weekend. Ridiculous amounts of drinking on Friday night at a nice lounge called Embassy, coming home and devouring some food, and sleeping until like 2 p.m. on Saturday – clearly, sightseeing was not the guys’ #1 priority. When we woke up, we didn’t head for Westminster Abbey, or the National Galleries, or St. Paul’s Cathedral, but instead to a Tex-Mex restaurant for some grub, margaritas and beer. Then after walking around and people-watching for a bit, back to the apartment for a late afternoon nap. Apparently, sleeping until 2 p.m. wasn’t enough to recover from the previous night. Saturday night, more heavy drinking at a really cool hookah lounge/club called Isis. We were even lucky enough to encounter an Indian bachelorette party. Spent some time chatting them up, but unfortunately most of them had boyfriends and they eventually left to continue their party at another club, or maybe a strip club. I don’t really remember, as I was drunk enough that after leaving the club, I proceeded to puke in front of my building, and fall asleep fully clothed and fully upright on my living room couch. Good times! Fortunately, the guys (except poor PB who lost his passport) left the next morning for Barcelona, so Sunday was the typical Sunday spent relaxing and recovering.

After spending Monday and Tuesday recovering from the events of the weekend (my tolerance has declined dramatically since I moved to London), I boarded a plane to Madrid on Wednesday morning to meet the guys. During my Western Europe backpacking trip 5 years ago, Barcelona was easily my favorite city, and most people I’ve talked to said Madrid was even better, so I was super-stoked for the trip. We spent the first day wandering around the city, working up quite a sweat in the searing 90+ heat. We checked out the 2 major museums there, the Museo del Prado (historical art) and the Museo Reina Sofia (modern art, including a lot of Picasso’s work, including his famous Guernica, which was really cool to check out in person). Wednesday night at about 2 a.m. (we were warned not to bother going to Madrid clubs before 2) we headed to a club called Pacha. Nice place with a lot of sofas to lounge on, and 3 bars on the first floor alone. Since it was a Wednesday night, it was pretty slow (by Madrid standards), but we still managed to get pretty drunk, leaving the club sick from cheap vodka and non-light cigarettes.

We managed to wake up early enough on Thursday to get ready and head to the train station to catch the 1:50 train to Toledo, a small town about 30 minutes away that supposedly is an old-style Spanish town that hasn’t been commercialized. Unfortunately, the Madrid Metro did not cooperate. After getting stuck on the train for like 20 minutes, we realized we weren’t going to catch the 1:50 train as planned. Since the next train wasn’t until 3:50, we just said screw it, got out, and spent the day roaming around on an overpriced tour bus, eating/drinking, and doing some shopping (FYI for anyone going to Madrid – there are Zara’s EVERYWHERE and the clothes are much cheaper than they are in the U.S.). We went to the biggest park in Madrid, which was pretty disappointing, with the highlights being the ridiculously fat pigeon we saw and the guy in a Mickey Mouse costume who asked Poo for money when Poo tried to take a picture with him. We also tried going to the Royal Palace, but alas it had closed at 6 p.m. I don’t get why stuff closed so early there. People party so late into the night, you have to assume that many tourists don’t wake up until well past noon. Then the lazy Spaniards are all siesta-ing in the early afternoon, so how much time does that leave for all the other stuff? Quite annoying.

On Thursday night, we headed for a club called Kapital. After yet another bad Metro experience, we finally got to the giant place with its 7 floors. It was the first club I’ve ever been to that actually had a directory of the different floors, as well as an elevator. After grabbing a couple drinks and exploring the first couple floors (standard Euro techno), we found exactly what we were looking for on the 3rd floor - hip-hop music and cute Indian girls. Needless to say, we didn’t explore floors 4-7 the entire night. After strategizing for a few minutes and grabbing another drink, Poo and I walked over to the girls and started chatting them up in Spanish – just in case they were actually locals. Of course, within about 20 seconds, we discovered they were Indian-Americans, who went to Cornell (and eventually acted like it), and even knew some of Poo and Fake’s friends from New York. Unfortunately, there were only 2 of them and 3 of us. Which I guess worked out OK as Fake (the one with the girlfriend) did a good job of winging for Poo and I, which essentially consisted of staying on the sidelines taking some pictures, sneaking us gum, and buying all of us drinks. Things seemed to be going reasonably well – we were chatting, drinking, dancing for a couple hours. Then, inevitably, at about 4 a.m., we hit a wall. After buying the girls two rounds (vs. 0 offers on their part to buy us drinks), they stopped drinking. Then, one of them knocked over Fake’s drink (€11, or about $14 for those scoring at home), breaking the glass. No apology. Then they said they wanted to go back to their hostel and sleep (I’m pretty confident they were lying and that they were really at a 5-star hotel and just didn’t want us to know they were spoiled rich kids who don’t know how to slum it up when traveling). We gave them a little shit for wanting to go home so early while on vacay in Madrid, so they ended up sticking around for a while longer. Still though – they didn’t drink anymore nor did they offer to buy us drinks. Then one of them kept saying she was hungry, saying “I need fries”, over and over again. So, at around 6 or 6:30 a.m., we left the club, and went across the street to some restaurant and ordered a couple plates of fries. No, they didn’t offer to pay for the fries either. We left the restaurant at around 7:30 a.m. (pretty cool partying until well past sunrise), saying we’d meet them the next afternoon at the Toledo train station, knowing we’d never see them again. Sure enough, we never saw them again, although in typical Indo style, one of them found Poo and me on Friendster. Which reminds me, I should probably delete the link to this blog from my Friendster profile.

Amazingly, despite getting home so late, we got up on Friday and made the 1:50 train to Toledo. Poo and PB were even alert enough to meet a couple girls on the train, who we spent the afternoon touring Toledo with. It’s a pretty nice city, though it seems to have gotten pretty commercialized. A lot of restaurants (including, of course, a McDonald’s) and retail stores (including, of course, a Zara). It did have a very nice Cathedral, which I’m forgetting the name of now, and a very mediocre Mosque. We admittedly didn’t see some of the other monuments, as it was raining and overcast, so we headed back on a 5:30 train.

Apparently, Friday night in Madrid is techno night. No matter where you go. Be warned. After deciding not to go into Ananda (a very cool looking place – ½ indoor and ½ outdoor, with an amazingly beautiful crowd, even by Spanish standards) because of the music, we headed back to Kapital, where we hoped to find a large group of, yet again, Indian bachelorettes that we had seen from our taxi near our hotel. Just our luck, we weren’t able to get in - even though it wasn’t yet 2 a.m., the bouncer claimed not to have space in their massive club for 4 guys. So we headed back to the only other place we knew, Pacha. It was there that an American exchange student living in Madrid notified us that Friday is simply techno night EVERYWHERE in Madrid. How disappointing – a large city known for its amazing nightlife apparently only has 1 genre of music available to Friday night clubbers. After having a couple drinks at Pacha and trying unsuccessfully to enjoy the music, we headed to a place called Chesterfields that the exchange student had told us about. More techno music, mixed in with some Spanish stuff. Admittedly disappointing way to end an amazing trip. Got back home at 5:30 a.m., packed my stuff up, watched some really bizarre porn that was on public-access Spanish TV, drunk-dialed a few friends back in the U.S., and headed straight for the airport, in full clubbing attire. One of the most painful flights of my life, even at only 2 hours.

Spent Saturday afternoon/evening back in London getting some desperately-needed sleep, taking the guys on the London Eye (the only “sightseeing” Fake and Poo did in London), and getting the obligatory Indian food. Saturday night we literally bounced between 2 clubs – Pangaea and Isis, in our endless and ultimately unfruitful search for cute, single Indian girls, before learning one of London’s harsh lessons. Apparently, at 3 a.m., you have to choose between getting food and going home. We found a cab and instead of going home, we asked him to drop us off somewhere we could get food. He took us to a falafel/kabob place, where we happily and hungrily got out even though it was nowhere near my apartment. Ordered some takeout food and went back on the street trying to find a taxi to take us home. We walked for literally like half an hour holding our damn hands out trying to flag an empty cab. Nothing. Plenty of the shady mini-cabs stopped for us, but none of them knew how to get to my apartment. After half an hour or so, we said screw it and started eating our food right there on the sidewalk, spilling lettuce and meat/falafel from our overstuffed pitas all over the otherwise clean London streets. After another 15 minutes or so of desperate searching, we finally sucked it up and paid a private car £20 to take us home, where we finally arrived at about 4:30.

Now, it’s Monday, back at the office. I’m moderately recovered after spending Sunday resting, reading (if you haven't yet, read The Kite Runner - GREAT novel), and watching a very lackluster French Open men’s final (this so-called Nadal-Federer rivalry is starting to bear a striking resemblance to the so-called Federer-Roddick rivalry). But I sense I’m starting to get sick, as I pretty much always do after 4-day boozefests like the one I just had. But it was well worth it, and now I just count down the 18 days remaining until I hop on that BA flight at Heathrow to head back to LA, where I shall, as 2Pac encourages us all to do, live and die.

Here's some good pictures from the week:

At Embassy, a club in London: