Australia Day & purple tights

I didn't get around to it yesterday so today I will give my Saturday recap. In the day-time in lieu of going to the gym, Mark and I walked up Kings Road in Chelsea (starting from home), which was like 2 or 3 miles. So Kings Road is just another shopping street, comparable to many others but still unique in its own way. It's main point of uniqueness is the quality of cars you have driving down this street. It was a constant stream (inter-mixed with buses) of Mercedes, BMWs, Aston Martins, Maseratis, Rolls Royces, Ferraris, etc. Like it was completely ridiculous. And there was a very high rate of horrible driving as well, primarily in the form of people blocking intersections after their light had turned red. Which resulted in a fair amount of honking. So along with the fancy cars, the people on Kings Road are also very fancy. Like I felt a bit out of place amongst these masses. Aside from the usual suspects of UK high street chains, they had a really neat Zara, a giant John Lewis (more on that in a second), and a really awesome little farmers market. Well, farmers market might be a stretch, as maybe one stall was selling veggies, but they had all kinds of fancy yet reasonably priced food and cheeses and baked goods and meat pies and huge pots of Thai food and all that stuff. Sadly we had just gotten sandwiches from Tesco Express about 20 minutes prior. We have made plans to return with appetites next Saturday.

So after ripping one of my pairs last week, I was after pants. And I needed new nylons, as well, they never last very long. So I went to Zara and loaded up to the try-on limit with 5 pairs (and a dress that was on sale that turned out to be unnaturally short and got easily vetoed). So I consider myself to be relatively tall, yet like all of these pants managed to be rather high-waisted, yet still cover my entire foot, even when standing on my tippy-toes. None of the pants made the cut. I'm hoping once the sales are done and the new stuff comes in I'll have better luck. After coming out of Zara entirely unimpressed with life, lucky Mark got dragged to the hosiery department at John Lewis. Aside from the usual pantyhose types, I got a new pair of black tights, these ones much more opaque than my last pair which had sort of died. As I hadn't spent enough time there already, I ended up grabbing a pair of 'grape' fashion tights on funky impulse. I was looking for something in a brown when Mark advised that I might have enough already. Which was true.

In the evening time we decided to go to a Mexican establishment we had seen last week. It was reached via the bus, so after donning the purple tights we hopped on. Now Saturday was Australia Day. Which is the anniversary of when the first boats of white settlers/prisoners arrived in Australia. In celebration of this day, Australians around the world gather to start drinking early in the day and keep going until late in the evening. At around 7pm, cruising via bus past the bars in Fulham Broadway I felt like I had entered some sort of parallel universe. The bars were suddenly all Australian (even the Havana Club!) and seemed to be having some competition for the largest Australian flag. The winner was seemingly the Slug @ Fulham, which is Australian all the time (they keep out the non-believers by playing unnaturally loud music at all hours of all days so it sort of hurts your ears as you walk by on the sidewalk). Despite what I thought was a relatively early hour, it had a very long line out front to get in. On the streets were people in shorts of t-shirts, some the Australian green and yellow, others were just wrapped in Australian flags. Now there seems to be a general concentration of Aussies in the Fulham area so I don't know how widespread this phenomenon was, but it certainly was intense.

This is getting long so I'll try and wrap it up. The Mexican place was still luckily Mexican and was very good, reasonably priced and had pitchers of sangria. Will be going back. Afterwards tried going to a movie but nothing looked good, so decided to try some local bars. The first one was overly pretentious and we couldn't figure out how to get served. The second one was Australian for the day and you could hear everyone inside singing along to Daydream Believer from a block away. The third was not only essentially empty, but was having a half price wine sale. So all the bottles of wine were half price. So it was like, have a bottle of wine or a cocktail and they were the same price. No brainer.

The purple tight wearing went well. But I'm not sure if I'll get up the guts to wear them to work this week. I think you just feel less silly wearing purple tights when others are walking around wearing flags.