ACDC Europa Squad: part 3

Saturday evening was supposed to be a pub crawl back to Piccadilly. Graeme had graciously designed the tour, but it immediately ran into trouble as we frantically searched for a pub, which showed the Arsenal v. Newcastle game. Fruitless… as we were definitely in the wrong part of town to be even talking about that game. Think of cheering for the Mets while you’re in the Bronx. Having watched every game Arsenal played this season, it seem like we had to travel to London to miss one. Perhaps irony should go with death and taxes as inevitabilities in life.

As the group improvised from pub to pub, we stumbled unknowingly into a “rainbow” pub. Ironically, it was one of the few that didn’t have “cock” in one form or another in the name. A conversation at the bar ran like this:

Matt to Carlos: “Hey, is that beer any good?”

Carlos to a patron at the bar: “I don’t know. Is that beer any good?” as the bartender pulled another pint.

Patron replied, “I’m just looking at the size of that head.”

Carlos responded, “Yeah... it’s big right?”

At this point, in need of an escape from the awkward situation, Carlos turned to Matt and said, “Sweetie, let’s get back to the guys.”

Running out of there with our poopers fortunately unmolested, we quickly ran into another “worked” by ladies with very different intentions. Yes, Ingrid claimed she is from Paris, but had an Eastern European accent, and didn’t parley any francais. Seeing that five of us didn’t have wedding bands, she quickly disappeared and returned with three friends who were similarly dressed, accented, and unbelievably friendly. She called for back-up! One of them wanted to touch my hand cuz I’m a surgeon. And drunk enough, I let her. It’s fortunate that Clamydia isn’t be transmitted by touch, or else, it’s yet another 3 months of doxycycline for me!

By this point, we have had enough and we decided to crawl back to central London, irrigating the local plant life along the way, singing at the top of our lungs. Our favorites were, in the tune of “La donna e mobile”:

“We’ve got Cesc Fabregas. We’ve got Cesc Fabregas. We’ve got Cesc Fabegras…”

and the standard taunt to the visiting team:

“Who are ya? Who are ya? Who are ya?”

We were like a band of hooligans meandering through the wealthiest sections of London, trying to be drunken belligerents. I think it was at this point that I drunk dialed Jeff to talk about the Sunday AC D.C. game. Drunken belligerents and Jeff somehow just go naturally together.

Sunday started plainly enough. We slept and met up late. The moment that we got together

coincided with the end of the AC D.C. game and Jeff had texted me the good news. We visited the Tower of London to see where people had their heads chopped off, rested, had Indian food, and then, just like a well-designed fireworks display, the finale arrived.

Three bottles of liquor we had purchased duty free simply had to be consumed. So, we pointed Mumbles and Peter in the right direction, and let them at it. Not too long afterwards, Mumbles discovered a geographic anomaly in our room in which he simply couldn’t cope with the strange gravity. First he fell out of the bed, and then he just kept falling down, often violently. I was minutes away from taking him to hospital to pump his stomach, but suddenly, it wasn’t a concern anymore.

And so we have come full circle. You already know the end where everybody passes out in the wrong bed, and I stayed up all night writing this junk. If someone had told me during the first AC D.C. happy hour, when only one person showed up, that I would be involved in this kind of shenanigans, I would have busted up laughing. I had to miss watching one game (Arsenal) and managing another (AC D.C.) to do this trip, so clearly the penguin is quite found our soon-to-be-married goalkeeper. I think the groom, newly anointed KG7 (for King George VII), had a pretty fine time, and that’s what matters most.