Friday, July 13, 2007

Partying for a worthy cause

If you’ve been living with your head under a rock for a while, you probably would have missed the 07-07-07 LIVE EARTH concerts.
“Live Earth is a 24-hour, 7-continent concert series taking place on 7/7/07 that will bring together more than 100 music artists and 2 billion people to trigger a global movement to solve the climate crisis.”
New York… London… Rio de Janeiro… Shanghai… Tokyo… Sydney… Hamburg and… JOHANNESBURG!!
There was no way in hell my girls and I were going to miss this one! (Thanks Noodle, for keeping us informed and hooking us up with Golden Circle tickets! xox) So, Maria, Gail, Trysten and I took some time out from work and hit the road to Jhb at 6am.

(Noodle flew because she’d booked an airticket ages in advance, before we even knew we were all going.) It was dry and cold and – apart from the 4 coffee stops and 45 minute accident traffic jam – pretty uneventful.

We made our way to the beautiful B&B arranged by Gail (FREE OF CHARGE!) through her awesome Aunty Margaret, unpacked and set off to the airport to fetch Noodle. Meanwhile, back at the ranch, Noodle’s plane gets delayed by about 3 hours! And by the time we looked for parking for 30minutes at the airport, had a couple of glasses of wine and stood at Arrivals for what felt like AGES we really didn’t know whether to laugh or cry when Noodle eventually made it through the sliding doors. We then got so tired and freaked out that we missed a couple of KEY turns from the GPS and ended up in the dodgiest part of Jhb. The GPS further freaked us out by flashing red and repeatedly shrieking “HIGH ATTACK ZONE! HIGH ATTACK ZONE!!”, so we promptly drove the wrong way up a one way street! By this stage I was pretending to be staring out my window, taking in the sights, but I was really just hoping that nobody could see the tears about to pour our of my eyes! After postponing our dinner four times, driving to 2 different “Main Street”s (thanks for nothing GPS!) and dropping Trysten off at Aunty Margaret (aka The Babysitter) we got back to the B&B, showered, dressed and were off to Soulsa (Melville) for dinner with Luke Michal of Eat This fame! (Name dropping!) I don’t think it was the mediocre steak that did it…

It must have been the 7 tequilas and ±3 glasses of wine, but the rest of it was a blur. I know we went to a club called Fuel. That much I remember… But I don’t remember taking a dog in with us; I definitely don’t remember singing Happy Birthday for the dj or owner… (Someone tells me there was even a cake and candles!) I remember a dirty martini or two and then we were back the B&B.

The girls and I sat around talking for what felt like half an hour, but I’m told it was really SEVEN THIRTY the next morning when we eventually collapsed into bed. GROAN.
At about 11-ish we dragged ourselves off to breakfast at some cool place in Melville not far from the B&B, (Black Coffee in think?) and pretty much had our omelettes on “auto-pilot”. From there it was off to Sandton City to pick up our Golden Circle tickets and some Haagen Das. We would have done more, but by this stage we were hanging so badly that we really just wanted to get back to bed to snooze for a couple of hours before the concert… Remember the concert? Our main reason for going to Jhb? Well! The last thing we needed was to stand in a crowd from 6pm to 12midnight with loud music and drunk, sweaty people! But dammit! We did it! And boy am I glad we did!

The African acts were brilliant. Angélique Kidjo and Baaba Maal had us rocking out inspite of ourselves! Zola had me almost breakdancing at one stage! I’ve seen UB40 twice before, and Joss Stone is lame, so I can’t say that I thought too much of those acts! We also deliberately missed DannyK (Hey Shordy?! Shut your face…), shame. I can’t say that I felt too comfortable after that chicken prego roll. It was a battle of sheer determination and pure brute strength keeping it down, but I did it! Along with the help of a Fanta grape. Mmmmmmmh.
Jhb is cold. COLD! COLD! COLD!
Understand this: I’m a Durban girl. Anything under 20ºC is cold for me! Jhb decided to fluctuate between 2ºC and 16ºC… God help us. Needless to say we’ve all come back with the flu.
Sunday was great for just bumming around the artsy-fartsy shops, restaurants and bakeries in Melville.

We lunched at a posh japanese place in Melrose Arch (dim sum = YUM!) and catching Ocean’s 13 after dropping Noodle off at the airport. By Monday 9am, we were ready to get our flu-ey asses back to Durban. Steers burgers, cola and Dido kept us company as we made our way back, gradually defrosting as the temperature gauge slowly made its way upwards. We knew we were back when we started peeling off layers of clothing and could feel our fingers and toes again…
What a crazy, awesome weekend!
I’m still trying to heal myself… I’ve been dosed out on flu medication all week which is why I haven’t been able to get this story into cyberspace yet.
We’re already planning our next girl’s trip, by the way. I’m just going to make sure that it happens some place warmer! Some place where there’s also no tequila…

3 comments:

Gail Streak said...

But it was gooood!

Gail Streak said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
noodle said...

Yes, it was a worthy cause. I feel like that hangover was really taking one for the planet…