Take Stonehenge the other day. Take Westminster, which charged £12 to enter parliament and £12 to enter the Abbey, and then wouldn't let you take photographs. I can understand Parliament, where I suppose it's a bit of a security risk - although not really, since the terrorists could just buy a postcard if they wanted to know what the place was like, and that still wouldn't really help them get through the extensive police presence - but the Abbey? Not where people are worshipping, of course, but the ancient artifacts? The ones which, like Stonehenge, they didn't make themselves and just found lying there where their ancestors left them?
And the Tower of London - £16.50 to get in, and although the big fuss is over "the Crown Jewels" (although all they mean by that is "some Crown Jewels", since the current ones aren't there and most of what is there appears to have been leant to them
It's obvious that the point is just to force you to buy postcards, and it's insulting that they expect us to buy all these pissweak excuses as well.
If they could figure out how to stop me taking a photograph of this without buying a postcard, I'm certain they would.
Talking of bargains, I was also highly amused to see them trying to sell packs of two playing card decks for FOURTEEN POUNDS NINETY FIVE. As in, 106 pieces of cardboard manufactured in China for ten cents and then onsold for the total of approximately forty Australian dollars.
However, my real problem with London - and the UK as a whole - is not the expense of tourist venues, or of buying a simply bloody fridge magnet.
This photograph has nothing to do with the post, I just thought it turned out nicely.
It's the fact they can't make chips. Nowhere in this land, that supposedly* invented the potato chip, have we been able to find chips to even the most basic Australian standard. I kid you not. They're all soggy. They're clearly made with ancient oil, so they're a dull brown. Even their KFC chips aren't seasoned. I don't understand how a nation that relies on one particular simple food as their main contribution to the culinary arts can botch it so badly.
It's mystifying. Why are they so completely flummoxed by the concept? Please, someone, for the sake of their constantly brutalised taste buds, teach our antipodean cousins how to make a chip, I beg you.
That aside, we've loved being here. Rome next... I wonder if they can do pasta?
UPDATE 19/8: They can DEFINITELY do gelati.
*According to my vague memory, and I'm not bothering to check Wikipedia. Let's just assume I'm right.