I Hate London
OK, this is irrational, and I know it. Maybe writing this is therapeutic somehow. I hate London. I’ve been there three times since 1989 and haven’t really enjoyed any of them.
Yes, the museums there are nice, and I was in heaven when I got to visit an antiquarian book store on my first trip (think about it, that was maybe an hour of my life 18 years ago and I still remember it fondly).
I liked Bath. I liked York. Edinburgh was fun. Dover was quaint. I hated London. I think that everything I disliked about England, whether it was London-specific, such as the underground, or countrywide, such as the idiotic payphones, became projected as “bad London.”
I’m sure that arriving late that first trip didn’t help. I’m sure that the fact that the tour screwed up my hotel reservation didn’t help. They had changed my gender so that they would have had a bed for my sister but not me (shared accommodation, don’t you know). But I think the moment that I first realized that I hated London was my first breakfast there.
Cold toast I can understand, that’s just a cultural difference. But hot orange juice? What idiot makes orange juice from a frozen can and boiling water? It’s not tea, dammit!
Every time I had to use a payphone in London it either didn’t work, didn’t accept money – prepaid card only, or it worked and it ate a bunch of my money and didn't refund the unused amount. I was on a tight budget. Losing a Pound (about $2 US) because a bloody phone refused to give a refund really hurt.
I found the city (but not really the air) to be dirty, with an old, scaled-on kind of dirt that I think is best suited to the word grime. Someone call Mary Poppins’ chimney sweep friends, they’ve got a lot of work to do.
I’ve been to big cities. I lived on the edge of Seoul for over two years (pop. 20+ million including the suburbs). I’ve navigated around Beijing no problem. Ditto New York, Sydney and Hong Kong. I can’t navigate my way around London, and unlike Beijing, I speak the language!
My last pass through London was mercifully short, 23 hours. And it’s not London’s fault that the airline lost my luggage. But it is somebody’s fault that when I was paged in the airport and told to pick up a red phone, that no one in the airport could show me a red phone! Once a red phone was found (it was behind where they store the unused luggage trolleys), the person on the other end had no idea why I was paged. I know that stupidity is universal, but it seems to seek me out in London.
On that layover, I booked my hotel through an agency, one of these ones that supposedly sells off rooms at a deep discount. I arrived to find out that my room didn’t include a bathroom, and it looked like someone had died on the carpet. All this for the greatly discounted price of 65 Pounds ($130 US). When I demanded my money back, it was given to me, kind of. It turned out that the refund included a bunch of coins that aren’t actually legal currency in the UK anymore.
I hate London.
And London hates me.
