London Eye and London Ire

I'll come right out and say it. London is not my place. Everything is twice as expensive as home. Now I don't really mind this if I am getting to experience something new but so much of what is available in London is produced by the same companies who produce it for the United States. Also, doubling prices for a family of four is no trivial thing. I wish I could justify it, but I can't. Especially when there are so many other interesting places to go in the world. Why someone would choose to live here other than "because they always have" is not understood my me. Perhaps if I was a young single professional living in the city center I would feel differently.

UTILITIES AND WATER: I have put together the following understanding of utilities and hot water based on my own experience and antidote. This may be specific to our current apartment but I somehow expect not. Utilities in London and all of Europe and England are extremely high priced. The residents of London then said "A ha! Then we won't use any!". To which the utility companies said "Then we will charge you for NOT using our utilities." Not to be outdone, apartment owners decided that if they were paying fees anyway that they might as well be comfortable so they devised the following system for obtaining hot water: Through an ingenious combination of turns both off and on of the hot and cold water dials a stimuli is given to the lines of pigeons on the roof. The stimuli scares the pigeons into pooping. The warm steamy poop lands on water pipes carefully laid below and heats the water to some random temperature just above freezing. Thus the answer to your request for hot water can be determined by many factors including how many pigeons are currently on the roof, how well they have been feed and when a request was last made. Did I say that London is not my place?


We rode on the London Eye today. The largest Ferris Wheel in the world. This picture does not do justice to how amazingly tall it is. It is really interesting to me that it is built like a bicycle wheel. It uses cables for spokes but the principle of the wheel being under compression is just the same as that used in a bicycle wheel but on a much larger scale.
As I said the pictures do not really do justice to the height.
The cars are really like large glass elevators and very stable. Not at all frightening to most people.
Like many of the things we have experienced here in London we found the Eye to be overpriced for a family considering what we got out of it. The Tower of London was a much better attraction for visiting with children. Between dirty windows and a foggy sky the pictures and view from the Eye was not spectacular. Whatever beauty London has must lie within. While many individual buildings stand out, the view of the city itself is drab.