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Published: July 15th 2006
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Picadilly Circus
I had a crazy obsession of photographing myself at every street that is a Monopoly property while in London. Here is just one of them As London is basically the only cheap flight destination from Bremen, I decided that a visit to London was a must. Seeing that a return flight from Bremen to London Luton was only €55 with EasyJet, Daniel, Michaella and I quickly booked the flights for a weekend trip...little did we realise the cost of accommodation and transfers to London! We left a wet and cold Bremen on Friday night and were lucky enough to have hot weather the whole time we were in London. I have heard that the weather in London is generally terrible, but that was most definitely not true for this weekend.
Apart from seeing one of the world’s most famous city’s, being in London was great because it restored a sense of normality.
I was excited to spend time in a newsagent and be able to read the newspaper and the trashy magazines in English! (And yes, I do realise Cosmo is pretty much readable by sight, but it’s nice to be able to read everything in there for a change) As trivial as this may sound, it was comforting to see that people were driving on the right side of the road again, and the
The Tower Bridge
I can't say that i have ever seen the road on an angle close to 90°! The Tower Bridge and London Tower were my favorite sites in London. keys went into the doorknob with the correct side facing up!
Because the flight to London was delayed, we arrived to our hotel room some time after one in the morning, but as we only had 2 days in London we had to make the most of it, so we got up at 7am to start our first day of sightseeing. As always, I had already made a list of things to see and planned the route that would ensure all of the main sights are seen. So we set off to see Buckingham Palace at the start of the day and soon found that the day would not go according to plan. As it turned out, the Queen’s Birthday Parade had resulted in many road and walkway closures so we had to take the long way around to get anywhere and thus some of the sights had to be skipped. From the pictures, you can see most of the places, and I have annotated them so that I do not have to write too much and you will not have to read too much 😊.
One problem when traveling to London is the fact that London is
Phone Booth on Bond Street
There I go again chasing the Monopoly streets! Bond St. has so many great shops but anyone with a normal salary cannot affort anything more than window shopping there. very expensive, and it is made worse by the conversion rate of the Aussie $ to £. For example,
a cup of coffee at Starbucks is £3.50 and the same cup of coffee in Australia will cost you $3.50, or a day pass for the train on an off-peak day is £5. (That’s nearly $15 Aussie dollars, but for that £5 they have a public transport system that is far superior to the Connex service back home.) However, provided you avoid eating out, the main sights in London can be seen relatively cheaply and many places like the British Museum and National Gallery are even free! On the internet, we also managed to score some cheap tickets to see the Mel Brooks Musical ‘The Producers’ which was fantastic, the story itself was hilarious and whoever did the casting did an amazing job because every one of the characters seemed perfect for the part. I’m sure that the parodies in the play about the Germans were so much funnier because I had been living in Germany for a few months but I was not sure if the Germans I was with would be as amused as I was. As it turned
out, Daniel liked it so much he wants to see the movie too.
The EasyBus Service that is anything but easy!
And let me finish with at tip to anyone who might be traveling to London….do not book your airport transfers with EasyJet because the booking is worthless! When we attempted to get on the bus that we had the tickets for to London we were told that the bus was full and that we had to wait for the next one. As we were so wrapped up in the excitement of the trip we were not too upset at having to wait 20min. However, coming back to the airport, we were at the stop 10min early which you would think to be sufficient when one had a fully paid booking. But oh no! The bus driver simply told us that the bus was full and that us having a ticket was simply not his problem and left.
We were a bit angry but still feeling OK about this because we still had ample time until the flight to Bremen. But then the second bus arrived and the driver told us that its not his problem we didn’t
make it in time for the correct bus, but that he would let us on if there was space left after boarding the people with the right ticket. When we saw that the bus was not full, a sight of relief came over us, that is until the driver said “oh, sorry but I let people without tickets who are paying £ on ahead of those with incorrect tickets”. By this point we had made sure that we had spent all our pounds to avoid loosing money in the conversion back to € so we had no means of paying for the bus so we were not let on again. With the delay now seriously jeopardizing our chances of getting to the check in on time and we were getting understandably upset.
The whole purpose of pre-booking and paying in advance is to ensure that there was a seat reserved for you to avoid this very situation, but this joke of a company did not seem to understand that on either leg of our journey. We did catch a break eventually and some guy who felt bad at having seen the predicament we were in gave me two free
Buckingham Palace
Daniel, Michaela & I at the Buckingham Palace tickets for the competing Greenline service thus allowing us to get to the check-in literally 5 min before closure. Although us stressing about being on time was unfounded because the EasyJet flight was delayed by a whole hour just like the incoming flight.
All things considered, the trip was great because I got to see a great city with great people, but every part of the EasyJet service was unacceptable.
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