What do you mean water costs £2.50?!

!!--LPW--!!

(Long Post Warning)

The Hotel

Okay, before we really get the ball rolling with a fabulous description of everything Lissa and I did in London, I'm going to get the hotel bashing out of the way so that I won't be tempted to stray back to this topic later on. I'm sure there will still be some hotel bashing throughout the post, but it will be significantly less than if I hadn't taken this moment to lay it all out for you, which I'm about to do. Now. In no particular order.


Things we disliked about our hotel:

• Not the easiest to find
  
  
• The room was small to say the least. The bed took up the majority of the room.
  
  
• The elevator was problematic. It would hold one person with luggage or two people without luggage and it wouldn't come when you called. Trying to use the elevator was one part faith that the thing wasn't going to crash to the ground and kill everyone on board, one part patience while you waited for the elevator to happen to arrive at your floor, and one part luck that, having actually obtained the elevator and said your prayers in hopes that you didn't die, the elevator would actually respond when you pressed the button for your desired destination.
  
  
• The bed was hard and lumpy. This bed was so bad that I seriously considered sleeping on the floor. Unfortunately the floor was lumpier than the bed and the bed took up so much room there wasn't enough floor to sleep on.
  
  
• The room was drafty, which might not have been so bad if housekeeping hadn't insisted on opening the window when they made up the room and leaving it open all day until we returned at around 10 o'clock at night.
  
  
• The walls were paper thin. Not only could you hear the loud and obnoxious Americans coming up the stairs at two in the morning, but the comprehensibility of their conversation actually increased when they entered their rooms. Two floors up.
  
  
• The hotel was very close to the tube network. Not the tube station, just the tunnels. We very clearly felt a train go by every 10 minutes or so.
  
  
• There were no batteries in the TV remote. Yes that's kind of a small thing, but it's also one that you kind of expect isn't it? I mean, come on! If you're going to have a remote for the TV you usually tend to expect that it will have batteries in it! Even if they are dead.
  
  
• The front desk would just hand out your room key to anyone. I've noticed this is kind of a wide-spread thing in Europe so our hotel can't take sole responsibility for this. Apparently, there's some kind of thriving hotel key black market here in Europe because hotels guard their keys viciously. They put these huge key rings the size of telephone books on them and require that you return the key to the front desk whenever you leave. Presumably this is so they can rob you blind whilst you're gone for the day. Despite this overprotectiveness of their keys, however, the front desk people will just hand over a room key to anyone that asks for it. Our first day in London I accidentally gave the front desk clerk the wrong room number, and before Lissa could correct me, he handed me the key to the room I'd asked for!

Now that we've gotten that out of the way I can stop complaining about the hotel and start complaining about everything else.

Day 1 (Thursday)

Thursday morning we took a direct flight from Warsaw to London Stansted airport. I mention this not because I think anyone cares, but so that I can say something else which people who plan on visiting London in the future might find interesting, which is this: the Stansted Express is awesome. They have signs for it everywhere telling you how awesome it is, but since that's the purpose of advertisements most people ignore them. In this case, however, the ads speak the truth. About an hour after we touched down we had taken the express into London and it had deposited us at a central Tube station.

After taking the tube across town we checked in to our hotel and went to drop our bags in the room. Dismay ensued (see above bullet list).

After spending about five minutes in our hotel room we decided to jump right into our cheesy touristy things so we headed over to Madam Tussaud's. To sum up the experience: we were directed to the wrong line; we wanted the line to buy tickets for the next day, but they put us in the line for same day tickets. We were already too invested in our current line by the time we realized a mistake had been made so we just stuck it out. We ended up waiting an hour and a half in a line that was designed to disappear around blind corners so that you could never tell just how long it was. The tickets were expensive as all get out. And speaking of get out, that's exactly what we would have done if they had refused to give us the "two for one when you present a tube ticket" deal.


Once we finally made it inside we actually had a fairly nice time. Although, admittedly, we did spend more time in line than we did in the museum itself which is kind of sad.

We then went over to British museum. It was getting late at this point so not a lot was open, but we did get to see the mummies and the impressive reading room. We couldn't actually enter the reading area since it was after hours, but we could look at all the pretty book spines!


This statue was my favorite "thing that I'd never seen before" that we saw at the museum. It's a statue of Venus and is sometimes known as 'Lely's Venus' since it once belonged to some painter named Sir Peter Lely. Anyone who's really interested can read more at the British Museum's website.

After prowling around the British museum for awhile we left and had dinner at a fabulous Thai restaurant. Lissa loved London since you couldn't swing a mummified cat without hitting at least three exotic restaurants. How do I know this? Well the British museum had mummified cats and...

Day 2 (Friday)

We started Friday by attempting to buy cheap theater tickets. An attempt which failed miserably. We then decided to drown away our sorrows by overindulging in a proper English breakfast with enough fat to choke a camel. And all for less than our hotel would have charged us for substantially less food (and fat)! The restaurant was a quaint typical little English deli run by a Turkish family.

We then went to the Victoria Alberts museum. Lissa was not overly impressed by their costume collection, but I did manage to find something to my liking:


How can you not like a dress made entirely out of teddy bears? It's a little hard to see in the picture since they're all black, but that's what the dress is composed of.

We then went to spend some time in the Tower of London. We took the last tour of the day which meant we didn't get to see as much as we would have liked since the tower closes at a very early 4 PM, but Lissa had never been on a guided tour there and they are quite entertaining. After our tour we did have enough time to see the crown jewels... twice.

We also managed to squeeze in enough time to get the standard cheesy tourist photo of Tower Bridge.


After our Tower experience we went up the road a bit and had an English tea that was not to Lissa's liking. Apparently it wasn't "fancy" enough. Personally I think it was much more realistic than what she had in mind. As it was our "non-fancy" tea cost us about $30. Yeah, London's expensive.


As the day wound down we found ourselves back by Leichester Square where we had previously failed to get tickets for a show. However, that evening we succeeded in getting tickets. For a movie. And they only cost us the low low price of $21 per ticket (that's $42 for two people to see a movie with no popcorn for the mathematically challenged)! We saw Memoirs of a Geisha since it seems unlikely that it's going to come here to Poland. It was pretty good. I don't know that it was $42 good, but that's neither here nor there.

That evening we also noted that they seemed to be setting up for some kind of event there in Leichester Square, but more on that later.

Day 3(Saturday)

We spent a good portion of the day at Portobello Road fighting against the crush of humanity that crowds that street on the weekends. It's basically a giant flea market/meat grinder. There's lots you can buy at little shops and stalls much like at a flea market and, much like a meat grinder, if you fall into it you won't be coming out in any recognizable form.


We stopped for lunch at a place were we both had breakfast for lunch. I only mention this because we were amazed that they could fry or poach the eggs, but scrambling them was too much to ask and could not be done. Apparently the chef had a broken wrist or something that prevented him from swirling the eggs around a little bit while they were in the pan.

Day 4 (Sunday)

We went to Covent Gardens, shopped around, and had lunch. We then watched Sham the Bum put on his act. He was a nice mixture of actual performing (juggling, unicycle riding) and comedy.


He was the only street performer that we saw while in London that we felt was worth tipping. It doesn't come across well in this particular picture, but there was actually a crowd a few hundred people gathered around him by the time his show ended. To me that's impressive when a street performer can command that kind of audience for a full half hour.

That evening found at back at Leichester Square again only to discover that the British Academy Film Awards (BAFAs) were being held that evening.


We pathetically hung around, in the rain, on the outside of a barrier, trying to glimpse someone famous. Only one famous person passed by while were standing there: Mr. Patrick Stewart. He was nice enough to pose for a picture with me.


He's obviously a little distracted by something off camera. It was probably the British paparazzi, but that's understandable. Okay, maybe we didn't really see him and that's just me at the wax museum, but he was there at the BAFAs! Somewhere...

Later on while watching some TV coverage of the BAFAs we realized that there really weren't that many famous people there and therefore our chances of seeing someone earlier in the evening had been pretty slim. There was a total of about 10 people that the cameras kept panning to over and over again because every time they looked somewhere else the people at home would all say, "Who on Earth is that? I really wish they'd pan back to that guy in the green jacket who came in with Patrick Stewart."

That's about it really. There was a whole breakfast fiasco on our last morning that further enforced our hatred of our hotel. The flight home was successful, obviously. I will say this about coming home: You know you live in a cold country when a London February seems warm to you.

-Dave