The 2008 Notting Hill Carnival

Fantastic! I've never really been to a carnival, so my experience at the Notting Hill Carnival was defining. I caught the last bit of the parade, which is essentially people dancing in face masks, scantily-clad women, and men and women gyrating sensually to loud dance hall. But that was only the beginning.

I'd woke up only an hour earlier and convinced myself that this event happened only once a year. I forced my lazy ass out of bed and jumped on the Hammersmith & City line to Westbourne Park Station. After making my way through several crowds of people dancing to different genres of pop music, all VERY loud, I happened upon some London Business School students I recognized from Pub Crawl. At least I wouldn't have to do Carnival by myself.

With each other and beer for company, we made our way through even more throngs of people, talking, joking, laughing, and hitting on random girls for laughs. At £7.00 a plate, food was at a premium, but beer and white wine kept our bellies full as time and daylight steadily slipped away.

Seven PM came, and the bulk of the LBS crowd got restless and left, leaving four strong: Francois from Canada, Gil from Togo, Maheep from India, and yours truly. We walked to a urinal where we met up with three Eastern European girls - we hung out with them for about an hour before one of them (who wasn't getting enough attention) dragged them away; we got into a verbal joust with 3 London girls (I elicited the wrath of one of them by calling her an "unfriendly bitch"...she'd earlier described herself as "unfriendly"; the 'bitch' bit was me and the beer within talking; we (all four of us) peed in the garden of a church; we converged on two unsuspecting Italian girls, who Maheep took control of eventually; we danced behind Ghanaian and Jamaican floats.

Of all these things, I have to point out that the Metropolitan Police are, without a doubt, the coolest police service I've ever encountered...and I have generally VERY little patience with the police. These guys are polite, friendly, and social. We got one of them to give us his hat so we could take pictures with him; I offered myself to a female officer for a bodily inspection amidst laughs from her male counterparts. Later that night, I saw the 'wrath' of the Police when one guy hit a Police officer in the face TWICE. Very quickly, about 20 officers converged on him. But instead of beating him down as I'd expect the police in the US or Ghana to do, they held him down until he was calm, then let him sit down and talked to him before sending him to the police station.

At this point, we were exhausted - it was well after 10PM. We walked slowly to the Westbourn Park Station and headed back to Baker Street and home.