Reflections on London

As I sit in my hotel room at the end of a long weekend in London, here are some reflections on what we have seen.

1               London can be a very tiring place:

We were looking round the bookshops on Charing Cross Road and visited Leicester Square as part of our Saturday afternoon. We discovered a new Nickelodeon shop as well as M&M world (which we planned to visit because I wanted a new T shirt!) and found them to be very (very, very) busy which was quite exhausting. It is also possible, however, to find a seat and watch the world go by. We watched the dancing fountains in Leicester Square and the tourists in Trafalgar Square.

2               London is a lot friendlier than it was 20 years ago:

When we visited London a long time ago we were struck by how unfriendly people in shops and restaurants were. This trip has shown us how things have changed. In every shop and restaurant (except one) we have been to the staff have been very friendly. The exception surprisingly was in a café/restaurant close to Harrods where the staff didn’t even look at us, the food was the most expensive we experienced in our whole visit and it wasn’t very nice. Everywhere else we found the food to be delicious and everyone very helpful and chatty.

3               The toilets that you pay for are not very nice:

We found free toilets in most parts of London, notably Trafalgar Square, that were very well cared for and pleasant to visit. In Covent Garden and beside Westminster Bridge we had to pay 50p to visit, which I wouldn’t mind if the money was spent looking after them, but they were the most disgusting toilets we visited! To pay for them and then be faced with dirty toilets and overflowing sanitary bins was not pleasant.

4               Contactless payment on public transport is the way to go:

I researched ways to pay on London Transport before we visited and discovered that you can now use contactless payment on TFL services in the way that you used to use an Oyster Card. You still get the benefit of daily and weekly capping, but don’t need to go to the hassle of ordering and topping up an Oyster Card. My debit card was due to be renewed in September and Gordon had conveniently lost his in July so I phoned the bank and asked for new cards and we were ready to go. I registered my cards with the TFL website because that meant that I could check what we had been charged (and that suits my control freak tendencies) and we were ready to go. A quick beep as we held our cards to the scanner as we got on a bus (or on and off the tube) and it was that easy. A London bus journey cost £1.50 so if you do 3 trips in a day you are winning, as the cap on bus journeys in the day is £4.40. There is a certain satisfaction to looking at the website to check you haven’t been overcharged and finding out that you have had 3 free bus journeys! I have still to check yesterday when we ventured onto the tube and DLR to see how much we spent.

5               There are places that you don’t find unless you have inside information:

We met my brother and sister-in-law who live in London for an afternoon. The plan was to meet on the Southbank for lunch and go for a wander. Following the directions we were given, we went past the normal southbank haunt of Giraffe (which is still very nice as we proved this afternoon when we ate there) and met them at the Southbank food market. There are a large number of stalls with too much food to choose from! I decided to have a chicken satay burger with rice, salad and peanut sauce. It was yummy. Others in our group had curry, a duck burger and pasta with pesto sauce. Lovely food and a very good price. Next we walked up the south bank of the river and visited Borough market. The variety of food on offer was amazing and my only disappointment was that we couldn’t buy any of the cheese or other varieties of food on offer because we had no way to store them or get them home before they spoiled! There are also free toilets in the Southbank Centre, which are very nice.

6               You can’t keep going at this pace for long:

We have had an amazing weekend, but I am now exhausted and need to go home for a rest. Gordon and Catherine went for a walk after dinner and ended up walking up The Strand, Fleet Street and Gray’s Inn Road on their way back to the hotel. I was shattered and got the bus back to King’s Cross and a much shorter walk home where I could write this blog post

Now to get the train home tomorrow and start researching Google to work out what we are going to do on our trip to Nice in September. Any suggestions would be welcome.