Ferris Bueller, extreme sweating and other stories

London is SO hot right now... and this is not only because of the thousands of things we get to see in this city every week and the amazing new bands that pop up in every corner and the outdoor events we get to attend in the summer (more of which later) and the free-drinks sponsored parties every night and everything else... BUT IT IS ACTUALLY BLOODY HOT!! I don't think we had had a summer like this in a long time if not ever...
Not that I want to complain, we spend around 8 months praying for some warmth and sunshine, but precisely because of the lack of, the city does not seem to be prepared for such temperatures (no air-con, fans, or enough outdoor swimming/watering facilities)... Plus, it seems to me that the issue of global warming becomes more and more real...

THE WORLD IS GOING TO END.
.........

Good summer things I've done so far:




Hampstead Heath - god it's fun! swimming in natural water as opposed to a swimming pool feels amazing! It's all about the density you know?
Somerset House - this is a prime spot for summer activities. Apart from being a really beautiful building, there are fountains in the middle of the courtyard where you cannot resist to get soaked! We ended up playing relay races with a team of about 15 kids who were playing there.
Brixton Lido - highlight: a gay couple with matching swimming trunks being challenged in gymnastics by a few little girls who were being coached by a former British Gymnastics Champion.

...........



Now to Ferris Bueller. Thanks to Lolo, who is the best PR/blagger/marketeer friend I have, we got some free tickets to Studio Artois, an outdoor cinema event where we were lucky enough to watch Ferris Bueller, an absolute 80s classic! I wish you could "bunk" work as Ferris bunks school...

Look Look (party time)

Crystal Castles has cool t-shirts ( as seen on Akiko)

Just started the blog and already getting lazy. Well it was a busy and long weekend, starting on Thursday when we made our way to 333 in Shoreditch to start the night with some gigs before going over to Cafe de Paris for the Young Turks night where Matthew was DJing.
Lost Penguin gave a rioutous performance as always, with Kerri perfecting the art of "flooring" me and my friends are so fond of. She has an energy and rapport with the audience that makes their sometimes less-than-perfect sets a really fun experience for everyone who sees them. And although she pulled him to the floor midway through the set, Kevin managed to keep it cool and just asked the audience to "get her some water!".
Having set the tone for the evening, they were followed by PRE, who are equally fronted by a charismatic female lead singer, Akiko, also a member of Comanechi. Theirs is a noisy and raw sound which has the added advantage of great stage antics. I won't really go into much detail here because at this point I was at the bar getting some water for Kerri... I did manage to take some photos because of my obsession with having it all in images, but other than that I spent some time talking to people who were there, including these two...

"err... Darren, you've got an African-shaped stain in your t-shirt"

Then I got to see Crystal Castles in the flesh at last, they were brought over by MEROK records all the way from Canada and are really good looking. I really like the stuff they've got online, it sounds like good pop (I'm a big pop fan) that has been swallowed and then gurgled out by some weird robot-like She-Ra (remember? the female counterpart to He-Man). Unfortunately as my main aim is usually to have fun and find free drinks I'm not very good with my music reviewing skills and can't tell much from the performance apart from the photos I took...

After a lot of dancing around and quite a bit of vodka we went to the Cafe de Paris party, organized by the Young Turks boys. I have to say the most fun part was the ride there (once we got away from the police), with about 20 excitable and extravagant - to say the least- inebriated kids taking over the top floor of a double-decker and probably making it an unforgettable fun/nightmare ride for the rest of the passengers. Didn't manage to take many pictures that weren't blurry, but I guess that's how I was seeing at the time after all the booze...

"the roof, the roof, the roof is on fire!"

Once we got there it kind of went downhill, with our big group splitting in the middle of the West End trying to find this place near Piccadilly, a place most of us hardly ever set foot in. The actual venue was amazing, a big old place with swanky interiors and the kind of staircases you see in costume dramas, but to be honest I thought the drinks to be too expensive, the bouncers too keen on stopping the fun and (I don't know if it was because it was late) the crowd too scattered around which made it seem as if there wasn't enough people in the dancefloor. One more important thing: THEY DIDN'T LET US DANCE ON THE STAGE!!! What has the world come to?? It should be made into a law to allow us a spot of stage-dancing every time... (they didn't allow us to la-la-la-la-limbo either)
Thankfully Matthew was there to cheer us up with some reggaeton!
Speaking of which, I've been trying to find a way of streaming some music right here on the blog, can anyone help me?

Now let's get back to it. I am getting rather tired and the rest of the weekend was a blur, including:

• Drinking lots of made-up cocktails for Luka's birthday party and taking over the birthday boy's room as a VIP girls-only den with me doing the laptop DJing
  
• Sleeping not very much (this repeats for Saturday)
  
• Spending four hours in IKEA Wembley with Eka, Chris, Andrea, Ellis and Theo pretending it was our own house -->see lying down on the beds, watching TV, having imaginary dinner parties in our own selected kitchens, making a random guy feel unconfortable for coming into "our" swanky flat uninvited and going crazy over the acuatic-themed children's room...
  
• Having a barbecue over at Loquicia's Dalston mansion with Cherry Lambrini on tap and Isa on the iPod (as ever)
• Isa sleeping
  
• Party on Commercial Road and stage-invasion on Shitdisco's set
• Isa sleeping
• Losing my voice (this repeats for... every weekend)
• A paddling pool (thankfully I was wearing a swimsuit so was the first to jump in - how very MTV Spring Break!)
• Isa sleeping
• A hippy festival in Shoreditch park and sleeping to the incessantly repeated tune of "Hare Krishna, Krishna Hare, Hare Rama..."
• Isa sleeping

One More Window

...to my life that is. Not content with having my life's contents spilled onto myspace and flickr, I have now decided to pour a little bit more of "brixtonianess" onto the already-quite-polluted web.
Why, you ask (or well, I do). Simply because I have nothing better to do right now.
No, seriously.

I stop on my tracks sometimes and think to myself "how did a girl who was born in the depths of the Colombian Amazon jungle (Leticia, to be more precise) end up in London in the middle of this whirlpool of creative energies?". I am amazed by every single day I live in this city, by the opportunity destiny has given me of having a year's worth of experiences every month, by being surrounded by incredible people every day, by being in the middle of something I only ever dreamed of when I was just a Colombian schoolgirl who watched Gianni Versace's death on the news with sorrow in my small amazonian house.

So this is why, actually. I want to share this sense of wonder of the world with the world.