If I am paying for this insanely expensive ticket to the UK (with no guarantee of being reimbursed for the ticket), doesn’t it make sense to stay in London for a couple extra days before heading back?
I think this is what I should do.
London
Opinions, art, debate
Clarissa's Blog 
Why? Aren’t there more interesting places in the UK? In England I’ve always thought the southwest and area northeast of London (the Wash) to be more interesting (haven’t been to either but if I had to go to England I’d probably prefer those)
If you know people in London it would be different. But that city’s always seemed like the last place in Europe I would want to be stuck, but what do I know?
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Yes, I disliked it the last time. But I won’t be able to shoulder the cost of the airplane ticket + traveling around.
I’m not working this summer, so I can’t go all crazy here. 🙂
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pre-booking might let you get some much cheaper ‘travelling around’ tickets than you expect – do email me if I can be of any help, this is JaneB having trouble with wordpress insisting my old moniker is the only one it will let me use. My email is mollimog at gmail…
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I loved London to bits when I visited it 8 years ago. It felt alive in a way that no other city I ever visited felt like. Of course, it’s been some time since then, and I was also on a Neil Gaiman/Alan Moore binge back then so I had my head full of the layered mythologies of cities in general and London in particular back then, so my memories probably aren’t the most objective advice, but worst case scenario, London definitely has enough good museums to fill up a couple days.
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“worst case scenario, London definitely has enough good museums to fill up a couple days.”
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Absolutely it would be worth staying on for a few days! If you like big, very busy, dirty cities with some very cool things like museums (and some very steep prices) then stay in London – the place freaks me out (the closest I can come to what the streets and the transport system does to me, and I really hope this isn’t ‘politically incorrect’ or insensitive, is that it’s like the descriptions of what it feels like to be autistic – nothing makes sense, there’s so much noise and colour and movement and information coming at me that I can’t sort out the inputs and everything gets mixed up and I have an overwhelming urge to curl up and shut it all out) but I try to budget for taxis and overground trains so I can avoid the worst of the crowds, and places like Kew Gardens and the British Museum are well worth the struggle of getting there. And of course it is such an iconic place I guess everyone should spend a bit of time there…
However, as cliff says, the rest of Britain is packed with amazing stuff too… I would go west or north or north-east, the south-east is crowded especially in summer and the east is relatively flat (but then, I like hills, you may prefer plains and agriculture…). I guess you’ll not be hiring a car? Without a car, getting around in places like the south-west and East Anglia is a real pain. But taking the train between cities (pre-book your tickets, they’ll be miles cheaper (seriously, the price of going from Edinburgh to London say can vary from £20 to over £200 on the exact same train and seat) and you will be able to book yourself a seat on the busy stretches of the lines – thetrainline website or the national rail network timetable and journey planner website will give you links to the relevant lines) gives you a great chance to see the variety of the country outside the window and stay in a couple of towns overnight. Edinburgh is spectacular if you’re not there during the festival (obviously it’s still great then, but SO BUSY!! And very hard to get a nice place to stay), and also has excellent museums plus access to the coast. Durham and York would also be nice places to go, or Cambridge which is pretty different from Oxford…
Whatever you decide I hope you have a wonderful time!
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“nothing makes sense, there’s so much noise and colour and movement and information coming at me that I can’t sort out the inputs and everything gets mixed up”
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Very well, I shall introduce you to Carnaby Street …
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carnaby_Street
Get off at Oxford Circus Tube station for this shopping experience.
Please keep in mind that I will not tell you which exits are the wrong exits because you say you enjoy the confusion surrounding this sort of thing. 🙂
If you survive this experience, try to make your way to 7-8 Conduit Street, which is where you’ll find one of my favourite tea shops in central London. It’s to the west of the Carnaby Street crowds, a short walk west of Regent Street.
BTW, while I’m thinking of it …
You might want a local SIM if you’re going to use data services to find things on maps. Three UK has a deal where you get 150 MB gratis if you top up £10, and it’s a plain PAYG SIM with 3p/min calls. (Also, if you dial 424 00 1 before any 10-digit US number, you can get 3p/min calls to the US, but only if you use this trick — I use it to ring up friends in the US for cheap.)
They’re the only mobile operator I know of that offers a plain PAYG plan that’s per use with credit that doesn’t expire. EE and O2 have relatively inexpensive monthly PAYG offerings, but since you’re only going to be here for a few days, try Three for this first. Pick up the SIM (usually £1) at Heathrow and ask for a £10 top-up at the same time — you’ll get the 150 MB gratis automatically with a £10 top-up or more. Their service works with any unlocked 3G (UMTS, not GSM) mobile and may work with some non-North American 4G (LTE) mobiles.
Top-up vouchers and SIMs can be bought nearly anywhere, but why I suggest picking all this up at Heathrow first is so you can have a working phone with cheaper local calling, which if you’re going to use your phone a bit will save you quite a bit of change.
There’s also considerably less risk of being over-billed for services — this isn’t like Fido/Rogers in Canada where they can “extend” you credit on a PAYG account so they can hammer you for a few hundred extra dollars at the least …
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“You might want a local SIM if you’re going to use data services to find things on maps. ”
“Pick up the SIM (usually £1) at Heathrow and ask for a £10 top-up at the same time — you’ll get the 150 MB gratis automatically with a £10 top-up or more. ”
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“there’s so much noise and colour and movement and information coming at me that I can’t sort out the inputs and everything gets mixed up and I have an overwhelming urge to curl up and shut it all out)”
I had that once in the Atlanta airport (and sometimes get it during the Christmas shopping season) but what happens is I just kind of wander around in a daze like a zombie for a while trying to make my way toward the exit…
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ATL is nothing compared to the confusion that will result from popping out of the Piccadilly Circus Tube station at the wrong exit …
ATL now also has its own mini-Heathrow T5 for departing international flights, which makes flying out of there considerably easier.
[always has to stop at the Varsity Jr for a “large FO” on the way through]
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Heathrow was absolutely horrible the last time I was there (2012.) HORRIBLE. And the British Airways flight was torture. They kept us on the runway for 2,5 hours without feeding us! Granted, when the food did arrive, it was Indian. But it took forever to arrive! I was so desperate on that flight that I watched 3 movies in a row! And I never watch movies!
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Heathrow is a mess because it’s really Heathrow 4.0, with several earlier projects built on the same area of land making its layout very, very strange.
The original field had a Star of David pattern that you might be able to recognise if you look at Heathrow with Google satellite imagery, but by the time Heathrow 3.0 rolled around, most of that was lost except for vestigial approach remnants and the layout of buildings. (Conspiracy theorists like going on at length about the Heathrow Star of David, so you’ll find plenty of that with Google as well.)
Present-day Heathrow is an example of what happens when you’re not allowed to close a facility completely to improve it. There’s a Haynes manual on Heathrow that you might find amusing if you’re into that sort of thing.
I suggest flying through Heathrow T5 (which means BA, mostly) — it’s more manageable, and the Tube station is easy to reach, especially when compared to the mess of Heathrow T1/2/3 …
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Too late. . . I’m coming through T2.
Oh well.
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Heathrow T2 has recently been rebuilt, so it’s not as awful as it was.
Take the Heathrow Express over to T5 to board the Tube as I suggested before — the Tube station is not convenient to T2, but the Heathrow Express is a bit better. (It also isn’t really convenient either, but it’s a bit more convenient — there’s a connecting tunnel between T1/2/3 that also serves the Heathrow Express stops.)
If you book your stay in London near Paddington, take the Heathrow Express instead — it’s £20 in standard class (or nearly £30 in first class, which is slightly easier with lots of luggage). If you’re taking a train to Oxford, this may make your day to check out of London easier.
Everything I said about Paddington, especially when it comes to large amounts of luggage, still applies …
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Also, LHR-ORD gets pushed back a lot — my last flight into ORD was also delayed by roughly 2.5 hours.
You were probably served Indian food because there are quite a few people who forget to make vegetarian meal requests, so some airlines tend to overstock vegetarian meals.
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Let’s back up a bit to that expensive ticket first …
My experience has been that American Airlines code shares are the cheapest way to fly into LHR from ORD, and that you’d probably pay around £900 or a bit less for a round trip if you go that way, even if you actually fly on British Airways with that AA code share. Three weeks or more advance booking seems to be necessary.
Although JaneB is right about train prices being sometimes wildly different, if you have to travel via First Great Western, the prices are wildly different in an upward direction at the moment. Paddington trains in particular became a lot pricier, and my quoted £90 for a one-way single fare in first class was purchased about one week in advance. The most I could have shaved off that was about £22.
Last summer when I popped back and forth between London and Bristol, the one-way fares were around £34 in first class. (First class service lets me avoid flying into Bristol with luggage, especially heavy luggage full of books.) Prices in the West Country have remained constant — it’s exactly the same amount year-on-year for tickets from a machine at the time of travel for the routes I take through Bristol Temple Meads.
All of this is why I mentioned bus services — they may not be as fast as the train, but you still get to see some scenery. I’ve mentioned National Express and Stagecoach before.
As for London, you may as well make the most of it as a resource …
If you actually have a budget to buy books, Charing Cross Road is the best place to start. Blackwell’s and Foyle’s are on Charing Cross Road. Get off at Charing Cross Road Tube station and walk north on Charing Cross Road — right now there’s long-term works construction around Tottenham Court Road, so you won’t be able to use that station.
The street used to be better for this — there have been many closures over the years, the most mourned about being the death of Murder One, which has not been replaced. (84 Charing Cross Road, made famous in a novel, is a location of the Leon chain of restaurants now as well, I believe.)
Waterstones Piccadilly is near Piccadilly Circus Tube station, so that’s a side journey, although it’s fairly close.
This site for antiquarian and out-of-print booksellers may also be of use:
http://www.inprint.co.uk/thebookguide/shops/location.php?loc=London
The British Library would be worth the visit — it’s between Euston and King’s Cross Tube stations. It’s closer to King’s Cross if you exit a certain way, but it’s less hassle to exit at Euston and then to walk along Euston Road to the library.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_Library#Using_the_library.27s_reading_rooms
You might want to ask about how to pay usage fees if you start using collections that are pay-per-page, such as newspapers — non-UK payment cards can be a problem to process at certain locations. (Don’t expect to use your US payment cards when buying groceries, for instance, and expect a few bank machines to refuse to process them.)
A few other libraries in London, such as the Wellcome Library, are free to join, but some aren’t — the London Library charges for membership, and it helps to be referred to the library. (The London Library, however, is a fantastic resource, and it’s been the working home of many writers over the years, although I suggest you might not want to make enquiries about yearly or lifetime membership fees unless you really like the feeling of sticker shock. Monthly memberships are around £40 or so, which should give you a rough idea.)
In fact, I mention the Wellcome Library because it’s near the British Library (closer to Euston Tube station) and because once you’re a member, there are considerable resources available outside the library. You can also have an inter-library loan made for some materials, although I don’t understand the charging mechanism for international loan vouchers so I haven’t a clue about how much inter-library loans would cost.
Otherwise, this is for JaneB as much as for you:
The Sundays — “Hideous Towns”:
“I went to the circus
Piccadilly Circus
It was very strange …”
🙂
[who has to admit that Bristol and the West have been a bit of a relief, and that I hadn’t realised how much London had ground me down …]
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This is a great comment! Thank you!
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Dear Jones, I am particularly interested in the subject of train tickets between London and Bristol in the summer… Would you mind to discuss it with me?
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London Paddington to Bristol Temple Meads is the route — it’s straightforward, and the route is usually direct.
The problem is “railway modernisation” going on at Paddington, so the rates for tickets that involve Paddington have gone up considerably. (My last round-trip off-peak day return fare cost me over £65, and it was not in posh class.)
First Great Western is the main operator, and if you book a ticket through National Rail Enquiries, when you go to make a purchase, it’ll direct you to FGW. They have the same parent company as First Bus, the main bus company in Bristol, but a rail ticket doesn’t give you bus usage rights unless you buy a PlusBus for it.
The PlusBus thing is very limited — you can buy a bus ticket good for all of Bristol with it, but it’s typically good for only the days of travel. If you want to use the bus in Bristol, buy the FirstWeek pass for £17 for just Bristol or £25 for their “West of England” pass, which interestingly excludes a large part of Somerset south of Wells. You should be able to buy it on any First bus or at the main bus station during their office hours. (There is no FirstWeek for “West of England Plus” — it’s £10 per day.)
Red tourist buses are an exception — you’ll pay almost as much for using one as you will for a FirstWeek pass for Bristol, so unless you really do want the guided tour, skip the red tourist buses and do your own research. 🙂
Pick up some bus schedules once you exit the fare gates, and if you’re in a hurry to get to Centre, take the 8 or 9 buses to Centre that are typically waiting on the drive up to the railway station entrance. The walk back toward Bristol Temple Meads from there will let you see a lot of the city core on foot, especially if you also take one of the shuttle boats nearby. The 8 and 9 will also take you up toward Clifton, which puts you near some shops and is an interesting walk downhill.
Broadmead’s easier on the 1 or 2 bus if you’re interested in shopping first — walk down from the station entrance to the “Reckless Engineer” for the stop. The main bus station is walking distance from Broadmead, and from there you can get buses into North Somerset and the surrounding area. (These are mostly X buses, such as the X1 toward Weston-super-Mare, the X5 toward Clevedon, etc.) The 1 and 2 will also take you up toward Clifton Down railway station, but they then head on toward Cribbs Causeway.
The National Express 040 also arrives at the main bus station, so if you suddenly have sticker shock after reviewing train ticket prices and you’re willing to give up time in exchange for lower costs, look at departing from the Victoria Coach Station in London instead.
And that’s pretty much it … 🙂
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Thank you very much and apologies for the late reply. We arranged our travel plans around Gatwick instead, and it seems one can take a train from Gatwick to Bristol for about 30 dollars (not pounds) and go around London. (Good option when traveling with large amounts of stuff…) A week pass is what we most likely will need in Bristol…
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It totally makes sense to add time to your trip. Even with the budget constraints, would it also make sense to add a side trip to Spain?
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This is VERY TEMPTING. But I’m resisting the temptation valiantly. 🙂
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I saw Shakespeare in the reconstructed Globe Theater and it was amazing. I was in the plebe “seats” – in other words, standing room on the ground floor only. I thought there was no way I could stand through and entire Shakespearian play… But I was totally transfixed! So that’s what I recommend doing!
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Aren’t you worried that Putin might have you assassinated?
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I don’t think he is likely to discover that I exist. 🙂
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In other news (and not to sully the thread about the Ukrainian soldier) tonight is Eurovision finals!
Sweden is favored to win with Russia a close second (neither does much for me)
My runaway favorite so far is Latvia
(but I haven’t heard the entries that didn’t go through the semi-final process so that might change tonight)
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“In other news (and not to sully the thread about the Ukrainian soldier) tonight is Eurovision finals!”
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BBC World Service had a story about the political messages in Eurovision. The commenter mentioned that the Russians were booed when they came on stage. He interpreted their song’s lyrics of “we’re not to blame” as an attempt to avoid responsibility for what they’re doing in Ukraine.
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Sounds about right. Last year their song was about crossing a line to take something you wanted….
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“Last year their song was about crossing a line to take something you wanted….”
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Right now Russia’s winning and the moderators are having to tell the audience not to boo.
The Russian entry was filmed holding hands with last year’s winner so she might have some ‘splainin’ to do….
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Sweden’s taken the lead (the live audience is very happy about this).
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They’re still voting but Sweden has it locked up (the audience is happy, they really didn’t want Russia to win).
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