London, part 6

Our second day of touring London was completely different from our first. We made it as far as the Disney Store on Oxford Street on a red double-decker bus before we hopped off to do some shopping.

I was not really impressed by Oxford Street. This was in part because I am a guy, and the word "shopping" generally doesn't send my heart singing the way it does for certain members of the fairer sex. (See my entry on "Hunting and gathering" for more about my views on shopping. The words "sports", "beer", or "Muscle Car" don't do much for me either, but I'm not sure what that means.) In part it was also because branches of many of the stores along Oxford Street, or their American analogs, are only a few minutes drive from my house in any of several local malls. But for my friends, this was a unique opportunity to shop at stores that I take for granted.

We spent a good bit of time on Oxford Street and decided to re-board a bus headed for Piccadilly Circus, where we would get our bearings, do some more shopping, and pick up a bus to our ultimate destination. I scanned the intricately complex bus schedule with some trepidation, aware of how I had gotten us dangerously far from our hotel the previous night by getting on the wrong bus. In the column for "Buses headed to this destination" the word "ALL" appeared for Piccadilly Circus. This looked easy.

Of course it was not. We sat in the upper deck with a French-speaking couple and enjoyed the ride for what seemed like a few minutes longer than it should have taken. Our bus eventually pulled across from a park, came to a stop - and then the driver shut off the engine. We began to mutter amongst ourselves and heard the driver, who was speaking to someone else, say "Do I still have passengers in my upper deck?" He came upstairs and, with some amusement, explained to us that this was the final destination for his bus. I wan't even aware that buses had final destinations in the middle of the day. Maybe it was lunchtime.

We got off somewhere in Bloomsbury and Fitzrova, possibly near Russell Square. Our bus options from this point were few, but we wanted to get in the neighborhood of the Tower Bridge, and we found a bus that would get us there. We got there by way of some of the less-touristy bits of South London, including an area known as The Elephant. But eventually we made it to within walking distance of our main destination for the day: The London Dungeon.


The London Dungeon is not an authentically historical site. It's basically a spook house, a place of grotesque and horrifying tableaux featuring wax figures and costumed actors. It's not too many steps above the haunted houses that are staged locally each Halloween, although the quality of the figures and the decorations in the Dungeon is a bit better than the stuff usually slapped together by firefighters and college students here.

Once again we were aided by a kindly couple who gave us a pass for a free adult admission with the purchase of an adult admission. As with the older couple at the Miso Noodle Bar the previous day and the guy who let us know that our Night Bus was headed in the wrong direction the previous night, contact was estblished by my friend, not by me. She is a good deal more sociable and engaging than I am and definitely has a way with people, whereas I tend to not make eye contact and simply hope that I don't have to defend my friends or myself from unprovoked acts of violence.

The London Dungeon is fun, but is mainly for kids. If you are traveling with adults only, don't expect anything more enlightening than a demonstration of various 17th-century torture implements (including one blunt member-chopper that I nicknamed the "tallywhacker".) But kids love the place.

Another bit of advice: if you go there, don't let on that you're a Catholic. They're not as tolerant of non-Protestants as you might think:
(Just kidding.)

We waited about a half hour to get into The London Dungeon. The tour itself took about 90 minutes (I think, I didn't actually check), and the after-tour in the gift shop took us right up to closing time. This was also closing time for pretty much everwhere else that we had considered visiting that day, so we decided to get a bus to Piccadilly Circus and go from there.

Again we were confounded by the bus schedules. We finally flagged down one bus and asked the driver where he was going. His response was "I don't know. I'm on diversion." - which seemed an odd sort of response from a man behind the wheel of a bus carrying passengers. We decided to let it go and try our luck elsewhere. We eventually got on a bus which was, once again, not going where we wanted to go. This was determined by my friend who, also once again, consulted with someone on the bus who advised us to ride that bus to the Liverpool Street station and get transportation from there. We opted to go Underground this time, the first time we had done that since we arrived in London via the Gatwick Express to Victoria Station and then the Circle Line to Paddington. This time we took the Central Line to Oxford Circus and then changed to the Bakerloo Line to Piccadilly Circus. We popped out in the lower floors of the Trocadero and did some shopping.

The afternoon had turned to evening and we hadn't had anything significant to eat since before noon. We hunted around a bit for a restaurant and decided on an Indian place on, I think, Shaftesbury Avenue. It was not a very good place. The food was overpriced and undersized and didn't taste very good. A request for water was responded to with the presentation of a huge bottle of very expensive mineral water. In the end the bill was twice what we had paid for the previous evening's meal.

We got our bearings and realized that we were very close to Leicester Square and Chinatown, two of the places specifically recommended by British blogger Puppetdude when I asked him for "advice for a hapless tourist". We staggered off to Leicester Square, zig-zagging from souvenir shop to souvenir shop, wandered around a bit (I had to restrain myself from taking pictures of a sign that simply read "SEX SHOP"), and eventually made our way back to a Starbucks. After coffee and pastries we gathered ourselves together and decided to make a push for Gerrard Street, London's Chinatown, which was heartbreakingly close and painfully full of what were probably wonderful and reasonably-priced Chinese restaurants. If only we had kept walking past the Indian place...

Our evening was pretty much over at this point. We walked down Wardour Street past two of the drunkest people I have ever seen in my life who were not face-down in puddles of their own vomit, walked past the Hard Rock Cafe and a group of bar-hopping girls who were dressed in skimpy clothing that seemed entirely inappropriate for the just-above-freezing temperatures, bid our farewells to Piccadilly Circus, got on a Night Bus actually headed for Paddington Station, and headed back to our hotel for one last night in London.