Monthly Archives: July 2004

Even more photos…

Here are some more PHOTOS, mostly of the major landmarks along the Thames. The tower bridge, the Eye of London (super slow ferris wheel), Big Ben/Westminster Abbey, me Blading. London Bridge (the flat one), bungee trampolining and a few other sites around town.

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Don’t Leave Home Without Them.

A lot of people asked me about ATM fees when I used my money card in London. The only fee I had for using the card was $-1.00. My bank doesn’t charge me any fees (I think) so it it was just the fee from the other end (although if that’s true I don’t know why only a dollar and not a pound). My experience with ATMs anywhere world wide (England, Costa Rica and Prague) has always been that the ATM has been perfect for a good exchange rate.

Charge cards are good everywhere and as far as I can tell have no extra fees and the banks calculate the exchange rate. Be sure to use one at Garfunkel’s because they use a cool remote gizmo to scan it at your table and print your receipt right there.

Be sure to get a good phone card (AT&T) from Sam’s club or somewhere so you can save $$$ on your calls back home. Be sure to look up on-line what the International numbers are to dial first to call back home. Read the instructions on the card, you can generally hit *** after making one call so you don’t need to dial all the digits again. If you have a 200 minute card you get about 30-60 minutes when calling back to the US (they calculate and tell you how much you have left at the start of each call) and you can add minutes with your charge card at the same really good rate (which is generally > 4 cents at home and 25-35 cents to call home). Use it from a pay phone NOT your room, they’ll really nail you from the hotels overseas. (Use change to call locally when you are overseas, otherwise it seems like you’re actually calling from the US to overseas when you use the card.)

A two pound pizza!

That’s how much it costs, not how much it weighs. A pound is a 100 pence. A pound is also a quid. A pound is about a $1.80 these days (not so good for us). A pound is a coin and all the other coins are hard to read the value. They also make a cool looking 2 pound coin (value not weight) that looks silver with a copper border (1/8th of an inch?).

Some like it hot!

So did I tell you they don’t like anything cold here? All the fizzies (sodas) and such are all generally kept at a temperature of just barely cool. So we’re always asking for ice and trying to dig in the back of the cooler. I bought a water yesterday just because it was in an ice bucket and it was so refreshing.

I just bought an ice cold Sprite which is why I am thinking of this and it is delicious! I really really wanted a coke but they were actually warm (yuck!).

Incompetent

The hired help here is pretty useless many times. The biggest problem is they don’t know how to say "I don’t know" and just make up an answer so if it’s an important question be sure to get (at least) two confirming answers. For example:

1) When you see a train arriving (on the wrong track) and you ask the guy at the ticket counter where it’s going and he tells you there is no train. Don’t argue with him for more than 88 seconds that there really is a train, just go down and check for yourself. That 2 seconds might be what you need so you don’t have to wait another 30 minutes for the next train (trust me).

2) When you ask the waitress what the "Scampi and Chips" is and she says it’s chips with scampi don’t bother asking any more. But if you feel the need and all she clarifies with is that chips are (french) fries (which anyone who’s been in London more than 15 minutes knows, i.e. fish and chips) with scampi. So you feel the need to clarify more and she tells you scampi is beef don’t think it’s a chips=fries thing, think it’s a she’s clueless thing. (I saw this one happen)

FYI – prawns=shrimp and tiger prawns=jumbo shrimp. When you order water (unless you want bottled) order tap water, it’s yummy and free. They don’t keep anything cold so be sure to get ice.

Also the less busy a store/restaurant is and the more staff they have, the lower the quality of service. :)

I’m not saying we didn’t have fun, I’m just saying it wasn’t had to find bad service.

Raya was awsome! (Pronounced Ria) She worked at the same place as #2. She answered all of our questions we asked about food, the restaurant, the register surveillance system (which she never noticed before), acting school and told us that M is for music.

We Will Rock You

Picture 3"We Will Rock You" is musical by Queen and Ben Elton (one of the guys who did "Tonight’s the Night") with the musical of Queen. We had front row seats, a few times I thought they might fall off the stage on us.

It was set in the future when rock and roll doesn’t exist any more (due to the evil corporations). It was kind of a Mad Mad future for the rebels who wanted rock back but the evil GlobalSoft wanted to keep their monopoly on their computer generated "music". It was good, but not as good as the other one.

The Tube

So everyone thinks they know what the tube layout looks like. london maplondonalt-mapEveryone has seen the map with all the colored lines to help them get around. Remember that’s just a representation to help you get around (did you ever see the West Wing episode with the ‘map makers for an equal society’), it’s all in how you represent it. I’ll attach a tube map and and more visual representation next to it. They are large maps but they are interesting to see the difference.

More photos on-line

Here’s some more PHOTOS (don’t forget I posted some last Friday too). The theater, the pub that has good fish & chips (the first time they had the best waitress and the second the worst), Picadilly Circus (a central area) and some odd subway “art”. I’m sure there’s some other stuff but I don’t recall it all this second…

You can use the right and left arrows (on the keyboard?) or click on the thumbnails to navigate through the photos. I’m not sure how slow this will be over dial-up, I thinks it will cache the photos so if you let it sit for a few minutes it should pre-load the photos and make it run a lot faster.

FYI – The Waffle Toffee Crunch Sundae count is four!