London
We started our trip in London because London is an incredible city and the birthplace of
so many of our cherished Western ideals. Also, it was the cheapest place to fly into from
DC. But we did the typical tourist thing and saw Hyde Park (next to our hotel), Buckingham Palace, the Horse Guards, Parliament, Westminster Abbey, the London Eye, Trafalgar Square, Leicester Square, St. Mark’s Basilica, the Millennium Bridge, the Tate Modern, the Globe Theater, the Tower Bridge, and finally the Tower of London. We finished up our four days in London by going to see Wicked at the Apollo Victoria Theater.
The only downside to the trip was the awful conversion rate between US Dollars and British Pounds. While we were there, it cost about $2.15 to purchase £1. That made everything pretty expensive (a beer cost about $8 US). This reached a ridiculous extreme when we had to take a taxi to Gatwick airport to catch our early-morning flight to Venice. Our hotel told us the fare would be around £60 but we thought that a bus or shuttle service would be more hassle than it was worth. Unfortunately, the fare ended up being over £145. That’s over $300 for a taxi ride. Needless to say we were pretty pissed at the hotel for giving us such faulty information. Luckily because we also arrived late, British Airways bumped us to a different flight and gave us more than the cost of the taxi ride in vouchers. But still, that was one expensive cab ride. The cabbie probably went home and put his feet up and watched movies the rest of the day.
