Tips for Traveling London & Paris

I’m back from a crazy week of traveling through London and Paris! This week has been pretty crazy with how many tests we had to catch up on. Wow. Anyway, I decided to post the tips I came up with for traveling in London and Paris instead of making you read through pages and pages of information that doesn’t really apply to you…hahaha. I highly recommend going to London while you are studying abroad over here. If you can fit a day or two in Paris that’s great but I’ve got to be honest…it was a lot sketchier than anywhere else I’ve been so far.

1. Bring cards for waiting in the airport. You will need to get to the airport pretty early but it’s pretty likely that your flight will be delayed.
2. There aren’t assigned seats with Ryanair…so when a line starts to form, GET IN IT!
3. If you leave Friday night, stay somewhere close to the airport and then get into the city the next day. Our flight landed in London Stansted around 1:30 in the morning (which was 2:30 back in Paderno) so we were so much happier just taking a taxi to our bed and breakfast nearby instead of needing to travel another hour to get into London. The airports that the cheap airlines fly into are not exactly close to the city you are trying to get to!
4. Once you get where you are staying, figure out which direction is north. This will help you a ton when you need to get on buses or subways so you don’t end up going the wrong direction. We were lost at least once a day on our trip…which was sad considering that when we were in London everyone spoke English!
5. Many of the big cities (at least London and Paris) have free walking tours that you can read about at your hostel. They take you past the main sites and give a long of interesting and funny facts about each one. If you do this on your first day you can learn where everything is and decide which places are worth returning to later.
6. Stay in small groups. You can’t please everyone in a large group so it becomes very difficult to choose places to eat or where to go.
7. In London, go to the Absolut Bar…it’s a bar made of ice! It requires advance reservations, costs about 12 pounds, and you only get to stay inside for 45 minutes…BUT the experience is completely worth it! Plus the pictures are pretty cool. You have to wear this Eskimo cape. Awesome.
8. If you can, go to a show while you are in London. We went to see Wicked and it was by far the coolest theater production I have ever seen. We didn’t book until the night before and still managed to get good seats for a good price…I don’t quite recommend waiting until the last minute but if you don’t know what you are doing each day then you can take a chance and wait until you get to London.
9. MOST IMPORTANT! Ignore people who ask if you speak English. They are either selling something, asking for money, or trying to take advantage of your tourist situation. Luckily we knew this before it came in handy! One guy asked us if we knew English and proceeded to pull out four quarters to ask how much it was worth. We did go ahead and tell him it was worth a dollar but then I noticed that another guy was getting closer and closer to us. When the guy asked us if we could exchange his dollar for euros, we knew this was a bad situation. All they really wanted to see was where we kept our money. We said no and moved away from them. Then while we were trying to buy our train tickets at a machine, they started taking pictures of us and wouldn’t go away! We decided it was safest just to go buy the tickets at a ticket booth instead of getting our money out while these guys were around. Just stay aware of your surroundings PLEASE! Had this been our first encounter in London when we were used to the small town feel of Paderno, we might have been in real trouble. The other people who asked if we spoke English on our travel break just wanted to hold out a piece of paper they had that was written in English asking for money because they had fallen on hard times or whatever. They do get a bit mad when you say no you don’t speak English or no you don’t have any money. The best situation is to just ignore them! Don’t say yes, don’t say no, just look like you are focused on what you are doing. You might feel a bit guilty but there is a reason they are hanging out in fast food joints and near tourist locations….they know that the instinct of Americans is to help anybody who says, “Do you speak English?” and looks desperate because they would’ve wanted to be helped out if they asked that same question.

Yeah, some of you might be from some big cities and know that last tip already. I would never have thought about it! I’ve lived in small towns my whole life so this whole pickpocketing thing is a new concept for me.

Well, I’m off to Switzerland this weekend…tell you about it next week!