My well-planned weekend

A wonderful thing about London...when you blow your nose, greyish-blackish specks show up on the Kleenex. Ewww.

I am currently home, though I was meant to be in Oxford tonight. As it turns out, they have closed the Magdalen Bridge, thanks to overzealous revelers last year. May 1 was on a Sunday last year, so evidently the gathering at sunrise was estimated at something like 20,000 people, which included very drunk college students who'd been at college balls all night and decided to go and see the Magdalen singers, but more importantly, to jump into the river. Except the river was very shallow, and of something like 100 people who jumped, 50 were admitted to the hospital, and of those, 30 suffered serious injuries. As an Oxford University alum quipped, "and these are England's best and brightest..."

I was planning to stay with my friend Jo at a house just outside center city. But with the bridge closed, that would have meant I wouldn't get to see or hear anything, because I would have been on the wrong side of the bridge. So I ended up coming back into London instead. It's a bit of a let-down to say the least, as I was all excited about my long weekend plans, and am now relegated to boring tasks like laundry, and maybe working on my professional portfolio tomorrow.

I did go to the beer festival in Reading yesterday...I don't have photos for you all unfortunately, I did not take my camera. Good thing too, since I did take my cell phone and realized in a drunken haze after midnight that it was gone. It was a show of solidarity, haha, with my sister who just lost hers. However, a very nice man who must have been a taxi driver or some kind of security guard (he mentioned working the night shift) found it, and got in touch with me, so I had it back less than 24 hours later, thank goodness. Anywho, the festival was a lot of fun, with a great band- they played everything from a Ceilidh to I found myself singing along with "gimme, gimme, gimme, the honky tonk blues." There were in theory 400 some British ales, although a fair number weren't available as they'd run out the night before (this festival apparently doesn't allot beer out per day, whenever it runs out, it's out, even if it's only the first night of the festival). I had a pint of something called Easter Gold, and then switched over to Perry-- like cider, but it's made from pears. I really liked it! I think I had the one pint of beer, 1 pint of perry, and two half-pints of cider, which was more than enough to give me a massive headache this morning. Ouch.