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Some other tips for London:
1) It is impossible to stay lost in central London.
Even if you don’t know where you are, just keep walking and you’ll find either an underground station or can flag down a black cab and ask.
London black cab drivers are professional people (it takes about the same length of time to become a licensed cabbie as it does to get a bachelors degree) and they know where everything is.
So if you find you don’t know where you are, don’t panic, start arguing or ask random groups of lads standing on street corners for directions – you’re not lost. You just don’t currently know where you are.
2) Your hotel room is smaller than you expected – it’s not personal.
As a British visitor to the USA, it took me ages to get used to the fact that America wasn’t Britain with funny accents.
So, I would guess that the same applies to American visitors to Britain. You may book a stylish 4 or 5 star hotel expecting the same size and quality of room as you’ll get at home. You won’t.
All those fantastic looking London hotels used to be something else. That’s why they look fantastic. The problem is London has been around for two thousand years and there ain’t much room left so things get squeezed in.
That goes for hotels as much as anything else. Expect to find that your room is smaller and somehow shabbier than you would find for the same money back home. Embrace it as part of the ‘London experience’ but don’t start thinking you’re getting a particularly poor deal – you are probably not.
This kind of stuff can ruin a stay in a foreign country (remind me never to tell you about the so-called 5 star hotel I once visited in Oman), so it’s best to start with realistic expectations and enjoy the good stuff.
One of the things we’ve experienced is that the cab fares double at Midnight (i think it’s midnight) which means that there are no cabs that will stop and give you a lift after 11:30 and before midnight. We ended up at a cab line at one of the tube stations, 20 cabs parked there at 11:45, every cabby out of the car talking to the others, until the rates change.
A friend mentioned that is worth hiring a car for the evening with a few friends, so that you have a ride home at the end of the night, but also you have a car to take you around if you want to find other events to check out.
From what i can tell, for the tube, if you get a 3 or 7 day pass (zone 1 and 2) was not that much more than the Oyster card as far as i can tell. But you sure want to avoid buying single trips during peak hours, you’ll pay £6 a day (3 day pass), vs £1.50 per ride with Oyster.
Be careful and have a designated, sober, all sober driver if you rent a car to go to events.
Driving on the wrong side of the road is trying even when totally sober.
I meant “Hire a Car, with a driver, from a service”
I don’t like driving at home, let alone in london!
