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Yep, I took a trip with my family to London and Paris. It was fun!
We took a flight from Newark to Heathrow via British Airways on May 15th (local date), stayed in London until May 20th, then took the Eurostar to Paris. Air France returned us to the USA on May 23rd.
Among other things, bad weather, British Airways union strikes, and volcanic ash were all avoided.
In total, I took over 800 photos, 55 video clips, and 2 timelapses. My cellphone captured over 100 photos, too. I've dispersed links to the photo galleries throughout this blog entry, but if you are impatient and don't care to continue reading, you may use the following links:
Note: most of these photos haven't been labeled. I'm working on it, but it will take time.
I'll cover short summaries of both cities, transportation to and from, some conclusions, and some other thoughts relevant to the trip.
We arrived in London Heathrow Airport on Sunday, May 16th and briefly hooked up with our tour group for the bus ride to the hotel. Before we left I acquired some GBP at a fairly horrible exchange rate.
We stayed at the Thistle Marble Arch hotel for our stay in London, which is near the Marble Arch at Hyde Park. Although the hotel was a little bit dated, it provided for a pleasant stay.
For the remainder of the first day, we wandered around Hyde Park and what apparently was the shopping district of London. We visited some department stores (Harrods) then had dinner, and afterwards got stuck in the rain and took a taxi back to the hotel. I'm pretty sure I tipped the taxi driver a bit too much, but I don't think he minded. He was probably thinking "stupid American tourists, ha ha!" or something.
The next day we obtained some travel cards (which we did every subsequent day, too) for the mass transit system (the tube and the bus system). The London Underground was fairly easy to navigate, and very clean compared to other subway systems I've used in the past.
The first attraction we encountered was a full contingent of Grenadier Guards practicing at Pall Mall for the Queen's birthday (it's in April, but officially celebrated in June). We were really too far away to get any good shots, though.
We then took a tour of the National Gallery and had lunch at the café. It was the first time I noticed a sign warning of pickpockets. Little did I know this would be a theme during the course of the week.
After departing the National Gallery, we visited the London Eye, which is essentially just a big Ferris wheel overlooking the River Thames.
(more London Eye photos)
Before riding it, we watched a small movie while standing up and wearing 3D glasses. Entitled the "4D experience" (or something like that), it was fairly silly show, and ended up just being a waste of time. The London Eye itself was pretty neat, and provided a nice view of Big Ben and the Houses of Parliament. Unfortunately, it was very sunny, and most of the photos I took contained a bit of glare.
After the London Eye, we wandered around Big Ben, Parliament, and Westminster Abbey. Across from Parliament was a square completely covered with signs and tents protesting various things. Nobody was really walking near it, probably for fear of being screamed at or something. It was weird. We finished off the day eating at a nice Italian restaurant, Signor Sassi.
The next day (Tuesday, now) we started off by stumbling across an Apple Store, not initially realizing that this is the only place in London with free Internet access. We hit St. Margaret then took an extensive tour of Westminister Abbey. They didn't allow photos. We ate lunch in the crypt of St. Martin-in-the-Fields, which was weird. What was also weird is the cashier taking 5-6 minutes to authorize my credit card. Maybe the Internet or phone lines were dead.
We then walked by St Paul's Cathedral and took the Millennium Bridge across the Thames to visit Shakespeare's Globe Theatre (a recreation, of course). We caught the first act of Henry VIII before moving onto the Tower Bridge.
We took the tour of the Tower Bridge, and then ate dinner at Côte Restaurant. The bridge was fairly impressive. I don't know what I was thinking, but for some reason I was under the impression it wasn't used anymore. Silly, I know!
(more St Paul's Cathedral photos)
The next day we made our way to St Paul's Cathedral and took the tour. This was probably one of the highlights of the trip. The cathedral itself was very impressive (no photos inside.. boo!) and also served as a burial place for several people, including Christopher Wren (he designed the cathedral). The best part of the tour was the visit to the galleries. The galleries were walking areas high up in the cathedral, and required climbing quite a few steps in order to reach them. The whispering gallery is 257 (30m) steps up, and provided a breathtaking view of the inside of the cathedral. Everyone was supposed to be quiet (whisper) but this little kid kept screaming "papa" loudly - it echoed all over the place. The stone gallery was 376 (53m) steps up, and provided a nice view of London. The last gallery required 152 more steps through small passageways and provided an 85 meter high view of London. It was great!
We ate lunch at the crypt in St Paul's. It was a nice sit-down restaurant. I don't know why we kept eating in crypts. The rest of the day was spent visiting Buckingham Palace, watching more of the Grenadier Guards, and eating dinner at Pizza on The Park (fairly fancy pizza dining, not what I was expecting!) at Knightsbridge.
Thursday was our travel day to Paris. We took the Eurostar, which took a little over two hours. The ride in the Chunnel only lasted around 20 minutes, though.
After arriving in Paris on the Eurostar (and eating lunch on the way), we spent the rest of Thursday with the tour group. It consisted of driving around Paris, listening to a French tour guide making silly comments about The Thinker statue, and stopping briefly for dinner. We chose Café Panis, where I had steak with French fries (they tasted like Burger King fries).
In the evening we took a ride on the Seine, which consisted of some interesting sights, a nice sunset, and one or two bare-chested teenage girls who flashed us from the Left Bank. Yeah, apparently they like to have fun with tourists.
Around 22:00 we watched the Eiffel Tower sparkle for a few minutes. Apparenly it does this on the hour in the evenings until early morning. It's too bad the tour bus was stuck in a jam during the first sparkle session, so we couldn't get out to take proper photos.
We stayed at the Pullman Bercy hotel, which was quite new, and provided (gasp!) complimentary Internet access.
On Friday we took the Paris Métro from the Cour Saint-Émilion station to the Musée du Louvre.
As a side note, we obtained a bunch of metro passes (single ride only) that were supposedly good on both the Paris Métro and the RER, to get around town, just like we did in London. Unfortunately, the passes didn't seem to work consistently, which left us wondering if they were only supposed to work in certain lines. After constantly having to replace the tickets (or have random people let us out of the subway, at times), we concluded that the tickets were either demagnetizing very quickly or the ticket printer at the Cour Saint-Émilion station was faulty. It proved rather annoying, combined with the "unpolished" subway system and RER being non-functional at times.
(more Lourve photos)
The Lourve was nice. Well, it was amazing. I took a short timelapse of the lobby:
Unlike all the other museums we visited during the week, the Lourve was the only one that allowed photography (non-flash, but that didn't stop anyone). I took quite a few photos. We saw the Mona Lisa, of course, which was fairly small. There was a huge crowd in the room, though. Some of the other highlights from the Lourve were the following (sorry for the excessive Wikipedia links, but really, it provides the best information):
We ate lunch at the museum.
The next attraction was the Eiffel Tower. Boy, this was a pain in the butt. Normally two pillars provided lifts to the top, but that day only the north lift was working, so the line was extensive. We did make it up to the third level (top). Very nice view, and there was even Wi-Fi provided (not free, of course) at the top. The whole thing took a total of three hours. Feet were very sore. While waiting in line on the ground, we witnessed one of the souvenir guys getting hauled off by the French police, supposedly due to pickpocketing. Apparently it's a fairly active sport.
Dinner that night was at the hotel, which was very nice.
Saturday started out with a trip to the Musée d'Orsay, where we couldn't take any photos, but saw lots of Monet and van Gogh. We ate lunch at the museum restaurant, which was fairly ornate (lots of gold trim).
(more Arc de Tripmphe photos)
We then headed to the Arc de Triomphe, and spent way too long trying to figure out how to get across the free-for-all traffic to reach the monument itself. Turns out there's two underground passages. I did see a couple people run through traffic and almost cause an incident.
On the way to Café de la Paix (warning, the website resizes your browser) for dinner, we walked through Champs-Élysées, but didn't buy anything. I snagged some free Wi-Fi near Fouquet's, though.
On Sunday, we took a bus trip to the Charles De Gaulle Airport, and flew home via Air France. I snagged some Ubuntu Cola in the terminal, before boarding.
Overall, the trip was fun. I think I liked London better than Paris, though.
London is a very diverse city (population-wise), maybe even more than New York City. It's also quite clean and easy to navigate. The Underground was a cinch, and I didn't see any graffiti or vandalism anywhere.
Paris, although home to beautiful museums and monuments, reminded me of NYC. It was quite dirty compared to London, and seemed to be a large amount of graffiti and vandalism all over the city.
The transportation wasn't bad. The BA flight to London was uneventful, but my seat was uncomfortable. I didn't get any sleep. The Air France flight was the same - butt was uncomfortable the whole time. I actually took a 10-15 minute nap on the Eurostar, though! Very comfortable.
Both cities seemed to suffer from pickpockets. There were signs posted in various locations advising tourists that pickpockets operate in the area.
One thing about the populations of London and Paris that took me a day or so to realize: there's no obesity. I only saw one obese person (who wasn't on the tour) during the course of the whole trip. Is it portion size? I think it might be - portions in the USA are out of control, it's something we need to work on.
Maybe it's related to the above, but I think that on average the women in London are far more attractive than women in the USA. Maybe it was because we were constantly surrounded by tourists, I'm not sure. Paris.. sorry, London's got you beat in this category, too.
There were lots and lots of class trips in London. I saw at least 4-5 groups of schoolchildren every day. Seeing class trips at the museums and the cathedrals was one thing, but we saw a couple groups just wandering the streets of London. Seemed odd.
Smoking. There were lots of smokers in both cities. Why? Have Europeans not figured out that smoking kills? Not only that but it's a turn-off. A shame.
Although we could have stuck with our tour group for the whole trip, we decided to spend a maximum of half a day with them, and take on both cities by ourselves. In retrospect, there's no doubt this was the right choice. Learning the mass transit and actually walking places provided much more insight than sitting in an air-conditioned tour bus jammed up in traffic. Also, we never felt rushed when spending time at the various museums and attractions. It would have been nice to learn some "tips" along the way, but I don't think we missed too much in that regard.
Wi-Fi. There were hardly any open Wi-Fi hotspots in either city. I'm talking about free access, not Boingo or any of the other providers that require payment. In the UK, apparently there's a law indirectly prohibiting this, which explains why I didn't encounter any free Internet acces in London (except the Apple store!). In Paris, I only came across two open networks, the hotel and Fouquet's.
We were wondering why every restaurant served us bottled water. Apparently tap water in London has a higher concentration of microbes than water in the USA. I found this out after the fact, I guess this might have been nice to learn from the tour guide, if we had taken the guided tours.
My Nokia E72 (E72-2) somehow worked on Orange UK and Orange France's UMTS networks just fine. However, AT&T's international roaming data rate is $0.0195/KB. I figured this out while still under 3MiB, otherwise it would have been disastrous. I didn't really use the phone on the trip, for this reason. It would have been nice to use Google Maps while wandering around the cities, but oh well. AT&T offers a couple packaged international roaming data plans, but none of them seemed to be worth it, and there isn't an easy way on my phone (or on AT&T's site, since it updates so slowly!) to keep track of the data usage, to prevent going over.
I guess one bad thing happened during the trip. On the second day of the trip, Ballantyne had a five hour power outage. All the computers in my condo died and remained off until I returned. Power bill was low, though!
Red, I'll have to visit those on the next trip! There was so much to see, we didn't even hit all the places on our list.
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London Water is great!
The reason they sold you bottled water is because it is illegal to sell tap water. Natives just ask for tap water, people who don't know get the bottled by default.
Expensive quick.
Wish I'd known you were going, I would have directed you to a few other places you would of enjoyed like Leicester Square and the Wong kei.