Looking at the map before coming to London, the Royal National seemed to be in a decent place, and from my experience of Toronto I expected it to be in the downtown core. Finally getting there, I could say I was a bit off. The hotel was located beside London University and a variety of residences, but it seemed quiet like a suburb rather than the city.

Various places on the net made out the hotel as a dump. I didn’t care that much as long as it was sleepable. Happy to report that it wasn’t too bad, I wouldn’t say it was a three star but more of a two star. There was a TV sorry — tele, soap, towels, toilet paper, blankets, hot water, most of everything you would need. No shampoo was the only problem. We had some difficulty finding our room as there were about 100 rooms per floor arranged in a generic dorm style.

The free breakfast was not worth anything. There was serve-yourself cereal (multi grain, corn flakes, bran flakes and rice krispies), OJ, milk, buns, and toast. The toast was especially sketchy as it didn’t really look like toast, was cold, and hardly toasted.

We also had a slight problem with the room being too warm, maybe they assumed all their visitors were from tropical areas, so they ran the heat up. This lead us to leave the windows open overnight, and let in the sounds of people chatting in the courtyard the whole night. Not that big of a problem when you’re exhausted though.

Overall the hotel wasn’t bad, but I wouldn’t want to spend time in it aside from sleeping. I think that we got a decent deal as a double room normally goes for £85 a night.

Our primary means of travel was the London Underground. Also known as the tube, it has much better coverage of London than the TTC has in Toronto. Although if you consider the suburbs, I don’t think it is THAT much better. Central London seems to be fairly well covered, although walking between stops is farther than walking between downtown stops on the TTC’s downtown loop. We bought a travel pass for £22 on an Oyster card. The Oyster card is a RFID card similar to Hong Kong’s Octupus cad which allowed us to have unlimited travel on buses and the tube within Zone 1 and 2 over 7 days.

We ended up riding the fabled double decker buses twice. The ride wasn’t really that interesting, it was like sitting in a coach but a little higher up. Although walking down the stairs with tired legs when the bus is (de-)accelerating is treacherous. When we took the bus at Portobello Road, the driver waved us through without having to use our Oyster cards. I guess we looked like tourists.

Posted by Kevin in Blogs Tags: diary, london, travelling