A Couple of Things

One of our guides pointed something out to us that was interesting. You can tell how old a row of "row houses" is in general terms by the backs of the buildings. When these were originally built, the backs were straight, without all of the little extensions poking out. The extensions were added when indoor plumbing (read toilets) was invented. They just added the rooms onto the back of the buildings rather than try to fit it in, inside. So generally the rows that have the extensions were built pre-indoor plumbing and the newer ones, a lot of them built after WW2 to replaced bombed out buildings, were built without the extensions and had the indoor plumbing included in the plan. Something like 60-80% of Londoners were displaced or made homeless by the bombing. So, buildings with the add-ons, pre WW2, and buildings without them, after WW2.

In England, if you need to GO, you ask for the toilet, the Loo, or less often now, the WC (water closet). If you ask for the restroom, you might not get what you want or need......you will get a place to rest.

On the "Getting Around" post, I was going to mention something and forgot. On the buses and on the tubes, they have automated a lot of things. They have what they call an Oyster Pass that they encourage locals to use. You can pre-load it with an amount of money and it's sort of like a credit card. You just pass it over the reader at the the turn sty and it debits your trip. It does this by tracking your entrance point and exit point. You can use the same system on both of the buses and tubes.

As visitors, we had these travel cards issued to us. They had an information strip on the back of the ticket. You put them in a slot on the gate, it reads the ticket and gives it back, if the ticket is good, it opens the gate. The first time we did this, one of the kids got all excited, "I know how to do this!" she exclaimed, "I saw it on Harry Potter!"

They have a few roving inspectors who have a little electronic machine that scans your ticket or Oyster Card to see if it is valid. Penalties can be severe if they think you are trying to cheat. We got inspected once, on the trip. At least one bank offers a debit/credit card Oyster Card that automatically takes it from your account so that you don't have to update the Oyster Card. I saw a lot of guys had their cards in their wallets and just laid the wallet on the reader point.