Getting About (cont'd)

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"Look Right" - This handy little reminder is painted at the crosswalk of many intersections throughout London. It's just the Brit's kind way of giving tourists a helping hand and avoiding insurance claims at the same time. Remember: Traffic will be coming at you from the wrong direction, and no matter how often you remind yourself, you will still find yourself stepping off the curb in front of a bus on many an occasion. In the end, you may find it best just to stay in your hotel, or limit yourself to jaunts around the block so you don't have to cross a street and risk becoming far more intimate than you ever wished with one of those giant black taxis.

"Request" Bus Stops - Here's just one of the many fun ways the Brits have invented for getting killed on the streets of London. These are stops on public bus routes that only function when a tourist has put their lives and limbs at proper risk. The idea is that the bus won't stop unless you run out in front of it, waving your arms and shouting obscure, Masonic chants at the driver. If you do not inflect your chants just right, he will pass you by, perhaps even running over the tips of your sneakers, or "trainers," as a warning to not try to flag down another bus until you really mean it.

Beware, however, of the double-decker bearing a bus seat-bottom strapped to its grille. This is a signal that the driver is taking the day off from actually picking up riders and is instead working on improving his aim by mowing down tourists who forgot to "Look Right" before stepping out onto a street.

Single/Return - This is easy. They are travel-ticket terms that mean, respectively, "one-way" and "round trip." If after reading the "coaches" definition above you are still intent upon buying overnight coach tickets to somewhere and are asked "single or return?" go with the single because believe me, you are not going to want to come back the same way you got there.

Subway - This is a chain of nasty sandwich stores that have inexplicably spread like wildfire across the United States. They make tasteless, floppy sandwiches on rolls that bear a close resemblance to Kleenex. I realize that has nothing to do with Britan, I'm just editorializing. In England, "a subway" is a pedestrian underpass, the kind of thing you wouldn't set foot inside of in New York or any other big American city for fear of getting mugged. If you're looking for the urban underground train system, look for the red and white signs that say "Underground." By the way, they don't need the Subway sandwich chain in England, because they already have "Casey Jones' Burgers."

Travelcard - A pass for the metro system that you can get encoded in more ways than the Eskimos have words for snow. To enter the "Underground" (see below), you have to insert this card into the "turnstile," which are actually tall, very narrow, and impossible-to-thwart doors that slide apart to let you through, as if you're greyhounds or something being let out of the gate to chase the little white rabbit of the train around in a circle while fat men holding beers shout and get ulcers and haggard women wearing dark sunglasses over their streaky mascara clutch desperately at losing tickets...but you know what I mean. Anyway, you also have to insert this Travelcard to get out of the Tube at the end of your trip, a thought that is not just little scary. You can, of course, just choose to drop 80p in the slot each time, but I don't know what you would then have to do in order to exit-perhaps forfeit your first-born child?

But, the magnetic card system is much easier than scrounging in your pockets for change or tokens, and more environmentally sound than punching little paper tickets each ride, so I think the Londoners have hit upon a simply wonderful idea that will affect us all positively for generations to come and I am behind the 100% on this. Now will somebody please tell this fool turnstile to let me out of the Tube stop?

Tube - (See: "Underground")

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