London and Gran Canaria Summary

I just arrived from my first major trip of the year. The BF and 6 other friends and I took an 11-day trip to London and the Canary Islands. It was absolutely fantastic. It's pretty easy for me to enjoy wherever I am, and being with the BF can make almost anyplace fun, but I have to say that the group of guys that we went with are just all great people, terrific friends and made our time so much better.

I plan to post more details later, but let me synopsize...

We spent the first 4 days in London where we went to XXL, Admiral Duncans, the Hoist and several bars whose names escape me. Four of us also went with a Londoner to a gay, nudist get together that was pretty cool and fun.

The last 7 days were spent in Gran Canaria. It's one of the few places I 've been in my life where we encountered very, very few Americans albeit there were plenty of Europeans and even several Canadians. There were also very, very few black people, which was a little surprising to me since it is geographically more a part of Africa than anywhere else.

We had 80 degree weather every day. We spent the days on the beach Las Playas Maspalomas. Things are pretty cheap there so we could've taken a cab to the beach for about 4 euros, but why would I when half of the walk was about a mile through dunes and nature where I could walk stark naked. Even the constant breeze helped keep us perfectly cooled during the walks. We had celebrated a cocktail party with the group back at the Villas Blancas resort where we were staying. We'd all get together and typically have a couple of other people that we had either met. Around 9 or so, we'd head down to the Yumbo center. This was like a huge courtyard-oriented, outdoor mall where there was there was plenty of shopping, restaurants and plenty of pretty good night entertainment. I normally don't like touristy things too much, but I actually really enjoyed the Yumbo center. After a week of being there, I still hadn't had enough of it.

The last thing I'll say in this first posting is that I was really struck by just how the gay the whole area was. I mean, yes it's a popular European gay destination, but it seemed to go far beyond that. For example, they were celebrating Carnival while we were there. All the locals participate in this and all of the young guys from ages 15 to 30 all dress up in the most pretty and feminine attire. There were butterflies, bumblebees and lots of boys in drag. Of course many of them were gay, but many of them were surprisingly straight too. It was pretty amazing to see a culture were being campy was so mainstream and to contemplate the obvious impact this has on acceptance in such a place. It's sad to think that I couldn't see this happening anywhere in the US anytime soon.

We took plenty of pictures which I tend to post soon. I haven't seen them yet since the airport lost one of our luggage bags and we've only just received it today (4 days later). Hopefully, nothing went missing such as our camera during this time.