Tuesday, November 1, 2011

CRITICAL! CRITICAL MASS!


Jaleh and I started practicing our Star Wars moves already early at work.

Finally, it was the day we had been waiting for. The day I had been waiting for a month. It was the Critical Mass day.
For you who have that questioning look on your face, read this: Critical Mass.

At 6pm we shut our laptops, grabbed our boards and ran out of the office.
Tube or skate, tube or skate?
Thanks to my ever so smart phone, Finnish quality Nokia, and the free Ovi maps navigation we made it juuust fine on time by board to South Bank where the mass departed from.
At this point we had already realized that all the knits and wolly socks were a biiit too much...


It wasn't hard to guess if we were in the right place or not. Though living in Holland for a year, had I never seen such a huge amount of bikers together. Plus accompanied with longboarders and rollerbladers. Of course if this would have been in Holland, the bikes would have been crazily decorated in Jedi knows what flowers and bright bells. But would I be lying if I'd say at it's best there were...say 400people? More? Less? I don't know. But many.

Seeing all the longboarders dressed up ever so smashing made me rethink my 'costume' again. Maybe I should have seen some effort and dressed up as something else than little miss boring.
We had Mario, Luigi, monkeys, Star Wars figures, the cookie monster, halloween monsters, and what not.


As said, the mass kicked off from South Bank and head straight to St. Pauls Cathedral from where it continued to pretty much everywhere. To be honest, I was too hyped about the whole event that I didn't even have the time to stop and think about where we were skating/biking/and all.

What I do remember are some bits I saw as the highlights:
- Passing Kings Cross
- Doing a McDonalds drive-thru attack
- Oxford Street with all tourists snapping pictures like crazy (apparently someone even got the chance to lay down in the middle of Oxford Circus and take a few relaxing breaths in the middle of the hectic night)
- cruising on the most loveliest streets of London, passing Hyde Park and rolling down all the way to Buckingham Palace...one chill, long and slightly down hilled road, gosh! Park Lane, pure love.


We even had a runner. Thumbs up!


The weather was fairly ok throughout the whole evening. Just some little refreshing raindrops at times.


The mass ended up going back to St. Pauls where protesters were camping.
Nobody really understood whether it was the end or not, but after around 4hours of skating at least my body was saying thank you, stop, eat, go home.

Well, I did listen to my body; stop, eat and and go home. But skated, making Friday a successful 5hour skate day.
Back home with a massive headache caused by lack of food and water but with an even more massive smile and the fact in mind, that waking up the next morning would be painful.

...and so it was.
But could I miss Ninja -skate? No. Even though it felt like a zombie skate for me.

An amazing weekend, amazing people, amazing boards, amazing London.
What's not to like?

<3
Linda

ps. unfortunately my video footage was far too little, but here a little something, anyway:
Music iremembertapes. - All I Know

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