Swing and a miss...

The brilliant plan for this evening was to grab dinner in Notting Hill and meet some girls for drinks at this "super cool" bar that Libby found online.  I thought the place looked like a gay bar or 70's porno set (see for yourself), but Libby was really pumped, so I agreed.

After dinner (and the calculated decision to only order one milkshake in order to ration our pounds...both kinds), we asked a pizza delivery man where to find the sex lair.  I mean "pub."

The good news: Notting Hill is charming, the sky was clear, we staved off that extra ice cream sundae, and we found ourselves euphorically happy at the realization that we still have five months to explore London.

The bad news: The bar was a warehouse.  Literally a side door off of an abandoned parking lot.  So much so that we past it four times before asking several Muslim men at the Islamic center around the corner where we were going.  (Needless to say, they didn't know.)

When the bouncer finally spotted us, showed us the door, and asked us if we were on the list (I tried to play it cool but Libby obviously laughed, "NO!"), he ushered us into what we assumed would be a list-worthy hot-bed of attractive English billionaires.

It was empty.  Except for a middle-aged black man on his laptop.  Oh and a bartender that didn't speak English. There were dozens of plush couches and weird art on the tall, white walls, but, as it turned out, we were actually the only people on the "list"

We re-grouped and--without so much as taking off our coats--wasted 29 cents on a text to the girls we were supposed to meet up with that read: "Sorry we keep changing plans, but this place is too weird.  Meet you at the pub right by the tube station?"

And so we made our graceful exit, stammering something unnecessarily apologetic to the confused bouncer like, "Oh we're just meeting our friends so they know where this place is...we'll be back... "

After a drink at the far less terrifying Plan B pub, our friends called to let us know they'd gotten off at the wrong stop.  It would take them 45 minutes and too much money to find us.

We gave up, finished our beer, and sang "American Pie" along with the rest of the Brits at the bar (in London, apparently group sing-a-longs are a normal stop along the way to full-fledged drunken debauchery.)

Then we went home.

I guess you could say we're still trying to figure things out.