London, United Kingdom - The Nation's Capital

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Three pounds each it had cost to secure our tickets down to St Pancras Station in London. A bargain to be behold. And when the Megabus pulled up we were all pleasantly surprised because it was modern and blue, and best of all, it contained a cantankerous old Yorkshire git. “Nobody move,” he barked as he opened the door. “And listen up. No one gets on my bus till I've checked your tickets. And don't even think about putting any luggage on board until I've checked you off the list.”

A young woman clearly hadn't heard this last instruction because she was dragging her suitcase to the side of the bus and was about to haul it aboard. “You!” the driver roared. “Did you not hear me, love? Put that down and get over her so I can see your ticket!”

Judging by his manner, the driver had cut his teeth working on buses full of secondary school children, either that or the army. As Angela and I stood there with our friends, Phil and Julie, we wondered what the journey down would be like.

Once we were all aboard, the man continued, this time over a microphone. “Everyone put your seatbelts on. No excuses. We're going on a motorway for god's sake!” As everyone scrabbled to put their belts on, he carried on, his accent thick with Yorkshire flavour. “And I don't want to see any bags by your feet. They should be in the overhead compartments. In an emergency, the last thing you'd want is to be tripping over a bag.” Upon hearing this, Phil immediately stood to put his bag up. “You should have done it before.” Mr Yorkshire snapped, shaking his head with a mixture of malice and disappointment. As we set off, the coach was more or less silent. Probably just as he liked it. Total Megabastard, I thought.

We arrived in London about five hours later and once we'd checked into our hotel, we caught the tube towards Westminster. As we sat on the surprisingly clean train, I began to read a newspaper story describing a heroic event that had taken place the previous day. A woman had been boarding a tube when the unimaginable happened. As she let go of her four-year-old son's hand so she could get a pram on board, the boy slipped and fell through the gap between the train and platform. Aware that the train could move off at any moment, the young mother held the doors of the train open and screamed the place down. According to the article, the platform had been packed with people, all frozen in shock. Suddenly a man appeared who reached down and somehow managed to pull the bewildered boy back up to safety. After he'd handed the boy back to his mother he simply disappeared. No one knew who this mystery man was, but the boy's mother was appealing for him to come forward. Without his swift action, the boy would have surely died.

When we emerged from Westminster Tube Station, the four of us were greeted with the sight of the Houses of Parliament and its even more famous clock tower, Big Ben. It was actually the first time I'd seen the building up close, and it looked quite magnificent, even in the murky conditions of a British summer's day. I wondered whether any MP's were inside, working out ways of covering up their expenses, but being summer, they were probably not at work, I realised. We moved across the road to a cafe overlooked by the London Eye and got involved in our own scandal over expenses. Two sandwiches and a couple of coffees came to over £14! “It's not actually called Big Ben, you know,” said Angela, as she chomped on a mouthful that had cost less than the national budget of Moldova. “Big Ben is the name of the bell inside the tower. Not many people know that.”

After our refreshments we wandered to Downing Street, all barricaded and protected by well-armed policemen. From our vantage point it was hard to recognise the place as the one I'd seen on TV so many times. Had it not been for the street sign and the heavy police presence, none of us would have known the Prime Minister lived somewhere along it. We waited for a moment, hoping to spot someone we recognised but soon grew bored and so moved on towards Trafalgar Square.

The last time I'd been in Trafalgar Square was back in 1990 when I was a student. A whole bunch of us had hit the square to celebrate the New Year and I remembered looking at the statue of Nelson atop his huge column thinking that it was bloody big. It still looked big today, as did the square itself. But the whole place was snarled up with big red London buses and big black London cabs, together with masses of people crawling around the fountains and lions.

“Do you fancy going to Covent Garden?” asked Phil as we walked away from the crowds. “It's not far from here.” In my ignorance, I actually thought Covent Garden would be a small park, perhaps with some birds and squirrels huddled around a picturesque lake. But of course I was hopelessly wrong. Covent Garden was a shopping centre, albeit one that specialised in small boutique-type stores. As Angela and Julie browsed, Phil and I milled about watching the clouds darken above us.

With the rain holding off for the time being, the four of us took a rather lengthy walk towards the Tower of London. Along the way we passed the mighty dome of St Paul's Cathedral, wondering how on Earth in had survived the Blitz without being damaged. For about a tenner we could climb a viewing platform around the dome, but we quickly decided against it. Ten pounds was a bit too steep, even for London

“That's the problem with this city,” I remarked to Angela as we wandered away. “They charge too much for everything. Ten quid to climb some steps. Twenty quid to go on the London Eye. Two hundred pounds to buy a sandwich. It's all one big rip off.”

The Tower of London was one of the few buildings in London to survive the Great Fire in 1666. It's also where the Crown Jewels were kept, guarded by the odd looking Beefeaters guards. Of course the Tower of London is more famous because of the executions that were held there. During the reign of Henry VIII, two of his wives got their heads chopped off in there. The entrance fee was £17 each and so we reluctantly walked past its exterior, staring at the turrets and battlements, wondering what it would have felt like for prisoners entering through Traitor’s Gate to await their grisly fate.

“Seen as we're here,” said Phil, looking at his map. “We might as well go and have a look at Tower Bridge.” Like a lot of central London, the iconic bridge was packed with people. To climb up one of its towers was seven pounds, which, even neglecting the queues, was never going to happen. One side of the bridge was undergoing massive restoration work because it was covered in some sort of white protective layer. The view across the Thames was quite impressive though.

As we headed back towards a tube station, the heavens suddenly opened and let rip. The people giving away free newspapers became swamped with pedestrians all wanting a paper as protection against the elements. In the news the next day, it said that a month's rain had fallen over central London in just two hours. To escape the deluge, the four of us sat in a bar, watching drenched commuters hurry past.

The next day we caught one of the many sight-seeing boats that plied the Thames during the tourist season. As we powered down from the Houses of Parliament to Tower Bridge, we received a running commentary from a slick and amusing young man with a microphone. He claimed he was an apprentice river boat captain, which involved a training period of between five to seven years, and as we passed sights of interest along the Thames, he told us about them.

We passed the Tate Modern, Cleopatra's Needle, St Paul's, the Globe Theatre, numerous bridges, and a shiny building made of blue glass, which the man informed us has been designed by an Italian architect, who'd turned about to be an unemployed window cleaner. A few people tittered at this and so the man continued. “Before I talk about anything else, I'd just like to inform you all that that was my best joke.”

He did tell us some interesting things. For instance, none of us had realised that wharf actually stood for 'warehouse at river front'. And when we approached the Tower of London, he started talking about the Bloody Tower, one of the more famous towers because of the murders that took place within. The two illegitimate sons of Edward IV had been placed in the tower, even though they were just thirteen and ten respectively. In 1483 they disappeared, believed murdered. Almost two hundred years later two skeletons were found during renovations to the tower and both children, adding to the belief that they had been killed. “A lot of people ask me where the Bloody Tower is, and I tell them all the same thing. We can't see it from the river because it's blocked by those Bloody trees.”

Though the rain of the previous day had stopped, the weather was very overcast, casting the buildings in a dull and dark look, which made the whole place look rather depressing. Even the Gherkin, one of the newer and more appealing skyscrapers of London, looked distinctly drab on the skyline.

Rather than take the ferry back to Westminster, we decided to visit the London Dungeons, another of the primary tourist sites in the city. And as with everywhere else we'd been, the queue was horrendous with an entry price to match and so we gave up after just two minutes, deciding to walk back along the riverside to Westminster.

Along the way we passed the replica of the Golden Hind, which like the original, had circumnavigated the globe. Further along was the Clink Prison Museum, which was built on the site of the notorious London prison which coined the future phrase for all prisons. High on the wall outside the prison was a mock-up of a gibbet, a gallows-like structure where the decomposing bodies of criminals were suspended as a deterrent to would-be criminals. This one had a cage to house the body, which acted as a way of prolonging the 'life' of the corpse. Five minutes walk away was the famous Anchor Pub, a hostelry with some once-famous patrons. William Shakespeare had supped some ale inside its now tourist-friendly interior, as did Samuel Pepys and Dr Samuel Johnson. In order to bask in some its delicious history, we went inside and had a decidedly undelicious lunch of fish and chips at a much inflated price.

After passing the replica of Shakespeare's Globe Theatre, we hit a long promenade populated by a wide variety of street performers. Some were dressed up in metallic-looking costumes; others were spinning plates in the most ingenuous of ways. One man had attached super long arms to himself which he tried to cuddle passersby with, and one person was dressed up as Mickey Mouse. The area was a popular one, and all of the performers had a cloth nearby for people to toss coins on.

The London Eye cost £100 between the four of us. Mind you, that was for the fast track tickets which enabled us to walk past the commoners standing huddled in the long queue. The impressive views as we rotated around the giant Ferris wheel, were somewhat spoilt by the weather. But what did we expect? It was bloody England after all. But from our vantage point, we could still see across most of Central London, with the Houses of Parliament and Westminster Abbey looking particularly good.

“London's not as high rise as I expected,” said Angela as we neared the top of the ride. I nodded in agreement. And as well as being a relatively low rise city it was also not a particularly pretty city. Yes there were pockets of beauty, such as Big Ben and the Houses of Parliament, but it certainly didn't have the wow factor of say Prague, New York or even Tallinn.

With the weather clearing up marginally, we took a stroll towards Buckingham Palace, which included a short amble through St James's Park. The park was full of families and tourists, some sitting on the many areas of green, but most content to just amble along the pathways, sometimes stopping to look at the very tame birds and squirrels that frequented the park.

Buckingham Palace was full of tourists and we joined them at the gates to stare at one of the red-uniformed guards who either stood completely still or else marched up and down for no apparent reason. We'd missed the changing of the guards, but I was reminded of something I'd seen on the internet some months previously. The footage showed a guard marching up and down when a young man, a student from China if I recall, decided to have some fun. With his pal watching and recording things on his camera, the student walked alongside the guard, pulling faces and generally acting the fool. The guard in question marched on, his face giving nothing away, until that is, he suddenly lost it and - quick as a flash- punched the man. When I watched the footage on line, I felt the young man had deserved everything he got.

The next day, Angela and I made our way to Harrods, possibly the most famous of all department stores. To me, it was no different to any other large shop I'd been in. There were various sections dedicated to household goods, clothing, food and even vacuum cleaners. The only discernible difference I could see, apart from the inflated prices, was the amount of shop assistants. They were everywhere, all of them immaculately turned out. With a train to catch we left after perhaps half an hour in the great shop.

The taxi driver who drove us to St Pancras Station was a friendly chap in his late forties. We soon got chatting and I asked him about The Knowledge, the rigorous test that all London cabbies have to go through in order to gain their license. “Yeah it took me four years and three months,” he told us with his cockney accent. “Probably the hardest thing I've ever done.” I asked him whether he'd studied for it in his spare time. “No, not at first. For the first two years I did it on weekends and evening around my job. I used to be a bank manager, believe it or not. But I failed the test five times in a row so I had to give my job up to concentrate on learning The Knowledge. We had to live on just my wife's wage, which was hard, you know.”

When we eventually stopped outside the train station, the metre reading was £21.30. “Let's just call it twenty, eh?” the taxi driver said. We paid the man thinking that we had met the only man in London not trying to rip us off in some way.

Strengths:
-Lots to see
-An efficient tube service (except when there is engineering works)
-Friendly cab drivers
-Good boat tours
-The history behind the place

Weaknesses:
-To get in anywhere it is a complete rip off
-The British weather can easily let you down
-Crowds of people
-Not actually that pretty

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Comments

[Vinny]

Guard
Actually the punk was from Colombia....ya..he deserved it from the Buckingham Palace guard.