Lon­don was a great sur­prise to me. I had been to Eng­land many times as a teen, first by tak­ing the ferry across the chan­nel and later by the Eurostar train. Eng­land to me was buy­ing “crips” with vine­gar at Wool­worth, tak­ing double-decker buses across small cities, lis­ten­ing to Oasis (I liked them bet­ter than Blur) and bitch­ing about the over­all gloomy weather.

I dreaded the price of accom­mo­da­tion in Lon­don. Indeed, try­ing to book an hotel or hos­tel online was pretty frus­trat­ing. Most places were either over­priced with ter­ri­ble reviews or over­priced and so far from Lon­don we had to zoom out from the map quite a bit to see where they were located. We even­tu­ally got lucky and booked a room in a nice neigh­bor­hood for an accept­able price, thanks to Expedia.

While accom­mo­da­tion remains expen­sive over­all, food was much cheaper than I thought it would be — and much bet­ter too. There were tons of eth­nic restau­rants around the city (mostly Indian, Chi­nese and Ital­ian) and a nice meal for two was around £20. A quick lunch in a pub for two was between £10 and £15. This is not cheap but def­i­nitely not as bad as I remem­bered it. And the food was good! I remem­bered all these “weird” Eng­lish com­bi­na­tion from my pre­vi­ous trips (chips and vine­gar, mint sauce and meat…), but we had none of that. Fish and chips was good and Indian food with a British twist is very tasty.

I couldn’t get enough of British Eng­lish. Peo­ple just sounded so polite and so proper! And the signs cracked me up. In North Amer­ica, they are mostly inter­dic­tion, such as “do not…”. The one that basi­cally says “do not let your dog poop every­where” is a good exam­ple of how elab­o­rate and proper signs can get. Oh, and it took us a while to under­stand the “free with­drawal” signs above the ATMs. No, it’s not about free all-you-can-withdraw money (damn!) but rather about the fact that these par­tic­u­lar ATMs don’t add an extra bank fee charge.

You can fol­low our trip to the U.K here on Flickr: United King­dom.

Fish’n’Chips

Indian Curry

Beer Menu	Feng’s Beer
Double-Decker Bus	Red Phone Booths
Funny Signs	Free ATM Cash? Seriously?
Look Right! Traffic	Chips
Evening News­pa­per	Foot­ball Teams
British Sou­venirs	Red Sou­venirs

Related arti­cles:

1. Kens­ing­ton Market
2. Toronto’s Chi­na­town
3. Syd­ney Fish Market
4. Mag­netic Island
5. Pic­ture of the Week: Cam­paign Signs