So, I just got back from London, and what a disappointment! I had been warned by several people that is was not a particularly great place, but I still had hope that with enough wandering around, I could find some fun. I couldn’t have been more wrong. The people were very nice, and I had some fantastic conversations, and a great time at the two parties I went to, but that was the sum of the fun.
The first fatal flaw with the city, for a night owl like me, was that they started rolling up the sidewalk as soon as it got dark, and absolutely everything was closed by about 11:00 at night. I’m a 24-hour kind of guy, and I could not believe there was a modern city in the 21st century where everyone was in bed by midnight. I normally don’t even really get going until almost dark, and most of my life is lived after the sun goes down. London is so not the city for me. LA is bad enough, but there are still things to do at midnight, and still restaurants open at 2:00 in the morning. Not in London! By midnight, it was a ghost town, and I got so bored, I never was even able to stay awake until 2:00. It was like being in a really big rural village in that regard. I don’t know if they all had to get up at dawn to tend the crops, or what, but they were all sound asleep and tucked away just as I was hitting my stride.
Then, of course, there was the cost. Now I live in LA, and have been to just about every city in America, as well as visiting Tokyo, so I thought I had a pretty good handle on what “expensive” meant. I was so horribly wrong! Costs in London, on absolutely everything, were easily twice that of the cost in LA or Tokyo. Some things were so expensive that I had to check them two or three times to make sure I wasn’t misreading something. We had one dinner for four people at a fairly nice, but by no means extravagant pub, and it cost £150! Now for those of you who don’t compulsively check the exchange rates, that is about $300. Of course the dollar is really weak right now, but even factoring out the exchange rate, that is phenomenally expensive for pizza and a few drinks even at the best exchange rate in five years of $1.60 to the £. Now, I’m not saying that four people couldn’t spend $300 on dinner and drinks right here in LA, because they could, but it would be a lot nicer meal, at a lot nicer place. Lest you think this was some fluke of just going to an overpriced place, even two people eating at Burger King cost £15. Yes, you read that right, $30 for two people at Burger King! A meal at KFC, which costs me $5.31 here in LA, or about ¥600 in Tokyo, cost £7 in London. Those prices kept that same level of inflation everywhere, on almost all products. It was brutal. Sure, the exchange rate made it even worse, but as I said, even if we had been in a best-case exchange rate scenario, they were still insanely high.
It is also a pretty boring city visually. In a lot of ways it reminds me of San Francisco. By that I mean that if you just close your eyes, and get dropped in either SF or London, when you open them again, your first thought is “oh, how picturesque.” However, after you take in the view of that street, and walk to the next street, you notice that it is the exact same picturesque view, and the same goes for the next several streets. Pretty soon you realize that what at first seemed picturesque and lovely, is in reality monotonous, and rather boring once you get over that first view. Even so, I think I got some nice pictures, and I will be uploading those over the next few days. It was hard to get good pictures though, because I like to try and capture the soul of a city when I take photos of it, and London struck me as fairly soulless.
Lastly, there was the fact that the entire city is the biggest tourist trap I have ever seen in my entire life. There wasn’t anywhere I went that I didn’t find the same touristy crap. It almost made Las Vegas seem like a real city it was so touristy. I spent a week going all over the place looking for the “real London,” just to conclude that it didn’t exist. It was really quite a marked contrast from Tokyo, where I just never came across anything that stood out as particularly touristy. A day before we left London, a couple of people at one of the parties we went to finally filled me in on the fact that I had to go pretty far out to the east part of the city to escape the touristy stuff, but then several other people immediately freaked out and said that going there was just asking to get mugged or stabbed. Next time I go back, if I ever go back, I will probably check out those areas, because I am just not much of one for the tour bus crowd.
All in all, I disliked the city so much that on several occasions I seriously considered calling the airline and moving up my flight as early as I could possibly get out. It was only the pleas of my wife, who was there for work, that kept me from coming back to LA early. I am ultimately glad I stayed, because I met some great people, and had fun getting to know them, but that was hardly a saving grace of the city itself.