London calling...

...but I was the one who had to accept the charges. And what charges they were: London's the most expensive city I've ever set foot in. The tube alone set me back £5 a day, which annoyed me to no end: not only is the London underground about ten times more expensive than the metros in St. Petersburg and Moscow, it's about ten times less reliable. Say what you will about Russians, but there are some things they just get right.
Then again, London's one of those places where there's almost too much to do at any given moment, so maybe my lack of spending money was good in that it limited my choices. Yeah. I'll go with that.
I managed to cover most of the typical tourist ground--Big Ben, Buckingham Palace, the Tower of London, etc. Of course, I didn't actually go into any of the buildings, but...eh. No amount of priceless historical artifacts could possibly be worth £12 a visit.
Almost all the museums in London are free--thank God--so I busied myself with the Tate Modern on Saturday and the British Museum on Sunday. Both were pretty amazing, although the British Museum, like the city it's located in, was a little too overwhelmingly huge for my tastes.
I loved the street markets in London--Edinburgh's lacking in that area. I scored enough free samples at the Broughton market to constitute half a lunch, and had to spend a little too much time at the Spittalfields market convincing myself not to buy a pair of vintage shoes (but they were only £45! Never mind that that's more than I've ever spent on a pair of new shoes...)
On top of the sightseeing, museumgoing and wandering around markets, I managed to go to a BBC Orchestra concert at the Royal Albert Hall Saturday night. The concert was part of the Proms, a summer series that's a lot like Tanglewood except that the cheap, general admission tickets aren't for spots on a lawn about a mile away from the action, but rather smack in front of the orchestra in a space that is for all intents and purposes a mosh pit...although I got the feeling that moshing was highly discouraged. The orchestra itself was great--they played Dvorak, and a Czech guy whose name I forgot, and Mozart (because apparently it's illegal to not play Mozart at concerts this year. Nothing against the guy, but seriously, a whole year? Does this mean that for the entirety of the year 2201, 250 years after Phil Collins was born, no band will be able to play a show without covering "Sssudio"? That's some scary shit.)
After the concert I went out with a couple of Spanish students from my hostel; after the pubs closed at midnight (midnight! What's that about?!) we went in search of a club, only to find that the cheapest ones cost upwards of £10 just to get in. Since I was frugal, and the Spanish guys even more so ("We went inside the Tower of London today," one of them said, "so we didn't have dinner") we contented ourselves with wandering around and people-watching, which turned out to be considerably entertaining.
So that was London. It was enough to make me want to go back with a lot more financial wherewithal and a lot more sleep (frugality be damned; I'm not getting on another overnight bus for as long as I live.) Still, one of the unexpected pleasures of the trip was that it made me realize how much I like Edinburgh. When I got on the coach on Sunday night and heard the driver speak with the kind of harsh Scottish brogue that would've scared me to death a month ago, I forgot how tired I was and how much money I'd spent and, for just a moment, thought simply: I'm going home!