London Night Life

Dani and I couldn't stay out late in London due to having to catch our train to Brussels at 8:30 a.m., but we did not want to completely miss out on the night scene, so we stuck around just enough to get a taste of Picadilly square, Leichester and Covington Gardens.

One of the main reasons we wanted to do this was because Dani has decided to write one of her papers on pubs throughout Europe--particularly because of the fact she worked at the pub, actually named "The Pub," on Fourth Street--and wants to see how authentic it actually is. We started at a place called Oneil's. Bars in England tend to get crowded quickly due to the fact they like to build upward rather than outward. They all extend back quite far but are never too wide and after you put a bar in the middle, it gets quite tricky to squeeze by people.

We found some locals who gave us their two cents on the pub and other pubs around the area. They recommended a local pub to visit, Porter's, but we were unable to find it once we left Oneil's. (We realized we did find it after the event, but at the time we did not realize it was actually a pub.) So instead we stopped in place called Walkabout, which we'd also seen in Brighton. While it was a pub, it was a much more energetic scene with live music and lots of dancing and singing along. I must say that I loved the choice of songs being played by the band that included U2, Oasis, "Breakfast at Tiffany's"...and even "Walk this Way." (Imagine that in an English accent and go ahead and laugh to yourself...we sure did.)

While Dani was going over the drink options--trying to find something cheap due to the dollar to pound transfer rate already eating away at our wallets--a friendly fellow leaned over and told her to throw the price list away and handed us each a Victoria Bitter and went on his way. The drink turned out to be all right. Nice flavor without any hanging aftertaste.

Unfortunately just as we were starting to get into and feel comfortable with London night life, our curfew was coming and we had a bus to catch back to Oxford. I suppose the pub crawl will just have to continue in Brussels.