Q: Huh??

A: My life as a Los Angelino, now
ex-patriate in London
A trite look into my
explorations and findings
of those wiley Brits
By the end, I will have
figured out what
makes them tic and
use mind control on them

London Survival Guide is another installation here at Limeys Everywhere which teaches you the do's and don'ts on making it in the real Gotham.

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• Avoid Cabs Like the Plague. Take the underground or walk instead. Cabs are way expensive and in most cases, the places you want to go are full of traffic and people on crutches will beat you there. Ask for the directory map book called 'A to Zed' which you can get at any magazine shop. The City is amazingly compressed and you can walk from one end to the other in an hour. Plus, the tube is super easy once you get it down. You can even take the Picadilly line directly from Heathrow. If you carry some change, you can avoid lines and just get a £4.00 day pass from the ticket machines. They also have weekend ones for £6.00.
• Like Indian Food. They have Indian food here like LA has Mexican places. They are everywhere and they are very good. The best place to go is on Brick Lane. Make sure you at least get Lamb Curry and a Chicken Tikka with Naan bread and a side of Saag Paneer.
• Like Beer. If you don't, consider yourself a leper. There are hundreds and hundreds of pubs and even more beers to choose from. A great area to go to the local bars and pubs is in Angel, and read my section on Beer beforehand.
• Avoid Stinking. The Underground is notorious for its smells. The damn thing is a hundred and twenty years old, so you know it's gonna smell a little funky. When taking the underground, if you take the very first car or the very last one, you can avoid the electric generators that stink up most of the cars with the carbon monoxide and oil smells they emit.
• Learn from Dr. Who and take a scarf. If you ever read Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, you would know to take a towel. A scarf is the next best thing because the temperatures can drop quickly and scarves are light, easy to carry and can keep anything from your neck to your head and hands warm.
• Learn from Mary Poppins and take an umbrella. The weather here is absolutely miserable and you are guaranteed not to make a seven day trip without seeing some kind of precipitation. It seems to always be either overcast and misty, raining, drizzling, or a torrential downpour. The good news is that it usually only lasts an hour or so a day. (Read my section on British weather)
• Street signs are nowhere to be seen. Street signage is a dismal mess when trying to find them. My suggestion is to look up in all directions. You will eventually find a street sign either part of the building face or attached to it about two floors up from street level. There is one saving grace for their backwards street system (which you can read details of in my section on London streets): the postal code is listed on every street sign. You will see EC1, W2, or NW6 for example in red below the street name. To illustrate, I work in EC1, which means East Central London, which is closer in then EC2 while we live in NW6 which means North West, 6 out from Central. That means no matter where you are, if you pass a street saying N3 and then another for N4, you then know that you are heading away from the city. I guess they put a little bit of logic in to throw you off guard about everything else.
• Avoid Leicester Square. Pronounced 'Lester', supposedly the center of the city, it is more like going to Tijuana and thinking you are in the real Mexico. It has every American chain in existence, including TGI Friday's, Ben & Jerry's, Pizza Hut, and of course McDeath. You will be duped into thinking that the UK is just a US wannabe when actually they are trying to appeal to American tourists who don't want to be away from America. Plus, pick pocketing is rampant there. For a real British experience, go instead to Camden Town Market, which totally rocks and is way cooler.
• Don't go near a Garfunkle's. It's a coffee shop kind of like Denny's but with food that tastes like a microwave dinner gone wrong. I ordered pasta with chicken and received a bowl of rubber, styrofoam, rotted vegetables and covered with some foreign thick butter substance. No matter how hungry you think you might be, just look away when you see one and eat your arm instead. By the way, I have been warned to also stay away from Angus Steakhouse.
• Blame it on the Canadians. There are enough Ugly Americans giving us bad PR out here as it is, so if you accidentally say something rude or obnoxious, say you are French Canadian and let them take the blame.
• Just accept that it sucks. Don't get mad, just get used to it. The service here sucks and there's nothing that your perception of what is right in the world will have any effect on making it better. We all have the expectation that when you give an establishment money, they will treat you like a customer. Here, you are an inconvenient byproduct of doing business. You will wait, you will be ignored, you will be overcharged, you will receive the wrong thing, and you will be told about store policies. And no complaining or seeing managers will ever change that. Consider it one of the unknown but accepted Laws of Physics like the 'strong force' of an atom. (Read my section on crap service)
• Yellow means 'GO'. A yellow light at a traffic signal occurs before a red AND a green. So you can get run over if you aren't paying attention to which yellow light it is. I have a theory that this is a mischievous way for the British to get even with Americans for losing the colonies.
• Understand Brit hygene. Reader Mike wrote, 'Wash your hands after shaking hands with men. This is for females (who don't get to witness this unfortunate fact): most (as in 75%+) British men do *not* wash their hands after urinating. This does not apply only to the young, homeless, or any other segment of British men. Having lived here over three years, I've noticed it everywhere, all the time, consistently. Men in suits in offices are just as bad as guys at soccer games. They just don't do it.' (Read my section on Deoderant)
• Drive at your own risk, in fact just don't. People from driving friendly cities sometimes think that renting a car is always the best way. BUt it aint in London. In London, gas is expensive, there is a £5 surcharge when entering the city and parking is at extorsion rates, that is, assuming you find the space that an empty space actually exists. (Read my section on this) Not to mention that the streets are a miriad of shifting street names and wrong turns. Reader Rhianna wrote, 'If you ever venture out of London on an M road avoid the M-25 like the Black Death it is. For all other Ms you may drive 90 MPH, without worry (as long as the speed limit is 70). The British assume if you're driving that fast that you're not causing a blockage to the roadway, and can thus escape ticketing.'

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