Last weekend, I’ve been to London. And yes, I took the above picture there, on Edgware Street, Paddington, Westminster, which is the only place so far where I have seen a Chinese doctor advertise in Arabic.
Actually, the whole street looks more like Pakistan than England, especially in the evenings when the air is heavy and sweet from the smoke of the hookah – and just to make it better, they have a restaurant called Beirut Express.

After spending a brief two days there, I can say that I like London, although it has it’s downs as every city – for example the hotel I stayed at was not too good. WiFi was expensive but useless, lucky I got a refund. The room was incredibly small – but clean, and that’s important – and the stairs was so steep I could not believe it, so, even if they don’t mention it on their homepage you better not go there if you have problems with narrow, 60 degrees steep stairs. And the “all rooms have wireless access” bit is true if you are not above the second floor. The breakfast was good though, and plenty.

I am admittedly not the best tourist in the world, I simply cannot go and visit sites, museums, and so on, so true to myself I started to roam the streets of London, going to shop at Sainsbury’s for Skittles, looking around in Borders – now that was a rather, erm, brave look around, but what can I do, 4 floors of books and DVDs, I simply broke down in the end -, eating in a backstreet pub, riding on the Tube, walking around the Hyde park, checking out the phone shops, and just spending time

And if we are talking about phones, the phones in London are way cheaper than in Hungary, and the monthly fees I saw are not higher either, so London is a mobile phone Mekka. When I go there next time, in a month I think, I will get my new phone from there, it costs half as much as here.

What I really did not like, the only thing that actually made me scowl was the charity lady – as a dear friend from London said, a “chugger” or charity mugger – who was pushy, rude, whining and downright greedy, and simply could not understand why I don’t want to give her “paper money” – 10 pounds, for which I can have 3 or 4 decent lunches here -, not even for the “poor kiddies” on Children’s Day.
But you can run into the same kind of people everywhere, so I put it down to general human traits.

An interesting I noticed was that wherever I went, Madrid, Barcelona, Paris, I always ran into some big construction projects.

Yes, in London too. And not only this, but even the Tube is under work, Victoria line is being improved and rebuilt. So if your city needs some development or construction works, invite me, and I will bring it along.

The other thing I noticed is, that London is big on signs. One of the most popular was the “For Sale” and “To Let” signs on homes and offices, but I think that’s only because of this mortgage crisis, which thankfully did not affect me as I have no mortgage.
The other kind of signs were the ones that told people how to behave and that they are watched all the time, like the following ones:

Apparently working at the transportation company is not the safest of jobs in London, and there are no private moments in a London citizen’s life because there are tons of CCTVs everywhere – note that they admittedly does not really work as expected or at least their effect is not substantiated, but it’s good to know you are watched.

But my favourite sign was this one:

A complete spy network. Don’t know what would have they done if I called the number to tell them I saw two officers of the MET cross the street when the traffic lights were red, and I find it suspicious that the people whose job is to keep the law and rules break the basic rules of traffic. I guess they would not have found it amusing.

Actually, if you think about it, this whole thing is not funny.

But these are just weird things I found in the City, and can’t really shadow the fact that I liked it a lot, there are really nice places, like the Royal Park, the National Museum, the Westminster Abbey, and the streets, where you can see a house from the 18th century right in front of a modern office building, the old and the new mixed rather haphazardly.

I think the only thing that caused me real problems were the traffic – when the cars are coming from the wrong direction it is really frustrating -, and the total lack of free WiFi. I went to Wetherspoon as
I was told they have free WiFi, but as my luck runs, that was the day when it did not work. And I did not want to pay up 5 pounds for 30 minutes on the T-Mobile site.
And all I wanted to do is send one e-mail with an attachment, but no way.
And what is most surprising is that so far the only airport i visited that gives you completely free WiFi – not free to connect and go to the page where you can pay for the use of the net, but free as in you can browse, surf, chat and it does not cost you anything – is Ferihegy in Budapest, Hungary, the country where broadband access is not widespread.

So, to cut my rather lengthy post on my visit to London it was an experience. And a good one at that. And the most important lesson is that next time I will not expect anything more than a 2m by 2m room from a Bed & Breakfast hotel.