Locobot

Well seeing the rosetta stone and all the other treasures plundered from antiquity was neat but I left London with such a distaste for the city. I was there years ago with a much better exchange rate and I still felt like I was hemorraging cash the entire time. The city is simply a horrible place for tourists who are channeled in to all of the most expensive options for admissions, transit, and food. The tower of London was extremely underwhelming. The Tate modern was okay...paying $15 for a bowl of noodles at the Tate modern sucked...I remember this more than the art. I ran out of things I wanted to do in London well before my time there was up, ended up going to a bunch of movies (also at exorbitant rates). Nearly getting jacked by the bouncers at a place that advertised (but didn't actually have) nude dancers because I refused to pay $300 for a 5 minute conversation (we didn't even touch eachother) with a whore was not too cool either. Those fuckers had some heavy Eastern European accents. I'm not some anti-anglo type, but London is seriously the locus of arrogance in the English speaking world and not worth visiting without $5k-10K to drop.

I was bored enough in London to think that going to see the Bank of London would be worthwhile...it's not. The FTSE doesn't even have a live trading floor...boooring. Speaker's Corner was completely empty while I was there, not a single raving luny to be heard. The train system is decades behind the rest of Europe, expect Amtrak-type delays of several hours, privatization didn't work out so well there. The best conversation I had in London with a native was with a girl collecting for the WWF, coincidentally she was from Manchester.

The average London salary is $63,141 per year, roughly 3 times the American average. The cold calculus is that London is simply not worth the expense for a visitor.