Tag Archives: london

A + A Eurotrip 2015 ~ United Kingdom (London)

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After a week being in Spain, we were quite relieved to be back in an English speaking country! Took the 9am bus from Manchester to London. Yes we took a bus! Megabus to be exact! After failing to purchase £15 Virgin train tickets to London because it was all sold out due to the match weekend. it was frustrating when you are already at the checkout when there’s a screen that says it has been sold out already within two hours of the early bird release! And because paying for  £80.60 train ride still doesn’t justify, we ended up booking Megabus which cost us  £18 for 2 people! Yes and it only takes about an hour longer!

  
Me being me, I look through TripAdvisor and websites for Megabus to see how reliable they are, with poor reviews dated 3-5 years ago. I took a breather and was pleasantly surprised that the bus was clean and there was toilet underneath the bus too. Most importantly, it reaches London on time! That was excellent and highly recommend it to anyone, if you don’t want to pay for exorbitant train prices!

We booked our accommodation with Tunes Hotel prior to arriving. The hotels and Airbnbs in London are quite pricey. For us location was a factor. So there it was we entered Tunes Hotel Westminster which is about 8 minutes walk to the London Eye and Big Ben too! So it was pretty convenient. Lucky for us, we did have a $50 Expedia voucher to off set the accommodation cost so that was handy!

Of course, the room is indeed small. I had to even pray near to the entrance door and there’s not even area to put your luggage except for the windows’ ledge. But the bed was comfortable and location was great. We couldn’t complaint much! We did had a nightmare finding a laundromat. I think for a hotel that doesn’ts offer a laundry service or a laundry room. At least have an information ready for your guests for them to know where is the nearest one. I was send down to the dry cleaners at lower marsh only to find out that they are not open on public holidays. The reception could have told me that when i was asking her for directions to the dry cleaners that morning. So disappointed with the wrong info communicated.

Nonetheless London was pretty awesome! Although I keep doubling the currency in my mind to match AUD! After we settled in the hotel, we walked to Big Ben all the way through to Chinatown to find food! It was good and even bought cup noodles for our trip! Which only lasts for 2 days! Haha 

  

We finally got to meet lil Joseph! Omg Hana and i were childhood neighbours! It was so funny as she was pretty much younger than me and her sister! It has been god knows how many years! And finally we are welcome to her wonderful home and with a pleasant surprise that her family was in town too! It was such a wonderful evening! Catching up and updating each other about our lives!
  With the help of Tripomatic, we went to most London attractions which Includes Kensington Palace, Tower Bridge, Picadilly Circus, Change of guards ceremony, Abbey Road and a couple of others! Thought we didnt go to the whole Harry Potter tour since we are not big fans, we decided to go to Kings Cross station to take a photo at the 3/4 platforms which is great! Imagine working as the person that hold the scarf for you when youre taking a photo! Lol

   

 

A+A EuroTrip 2015

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The husband was half hearted when i mentioned that we should carry forward our EuroTrip to April instead of September. But Alhamdulillah we did! Since we missed the Europe Travel Expo last November, we were lucky that the Global Travel Expo was on in February. We did thorough research on the prices of flights prior to the Expo and had our minds made up on a budget.

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This was our second flight purchase from the Travel expos that were organised by Flight Centre Group. You do need to look around and know where your budget is. So far the prices were cheaper than what we expected. Europe is by far the trip that scares us the most, the expenses, the people, the language barrier, we just don’t know what to expect!

We got Emirates flight going from Mel ✈️ Madrid 🚆 Barcelona ✈️ Manchester 🚌 London 🚆 Paris ✈️ Venice 🚆 Maranello 🚆 Pisa 🚆 Rome ✈️ Mel. This is definitely going to be interesting! We booked our Trains in Spain (Renfe) and Italy (Trenitalia) in January/February and got really cheap early bird fares! They usually open 120 days prior to your travel dates. However Virgin Trains and EuroStar opens 90 days in advance! We missed out on Virgin Trains as Manchester – London earlybird train fares was sold out pretty quickly. I guess it was due to the soccer match that weekend! Of course everyone will be rushing to get £15 tickets as compared to £80.60! Oh wells!

I highly recommend the app/website GoEuro to get the cheapest transportation fares in UK and Europe! And what i did was to go on the train/airline/bus website and book it directly. If you book it from GoEuro, you couldn’t choose your seats. We learnt it the hard way! Let’s see if we can negotiate with the train conductor if we can swap seats! lol

Seat 61 will be another website you would want to bookmark! A guide to travelling around Europe/UK (worldwide actually!) by train, including how to buy cheap train tickets! A site worth to visit! Another site worth looking at is Mozio it helps you with Airport transfers! Going to and from Airports is a breeze with Mozio, I’ve got quotes from quite a number of Operators (Cheapest, €65) for my transport from Kyriad Disneyland Hotel to Paris Orly Airport early morning. So far Mozio has been the cheapest (€51). The same for our Madrid Airport to AirBNB apartment in Madrid City. Taxi Fares are €30. At Mozio, I am paying about €21. Well, we shall see how reliable they are in a few days!

Once we got the transportation settled, we started looking at hotels/airbnb! Our budget for accommodations are $100 a day maximum! Alhamdulillah we manage to keep it all under budget! Besides AirBNB, We looked at Hotels combined, Trivago and Expedia. If you found any accommodations listed cheaper (on the sites) as compared to Expedia, they will be able to price match and in return put $50 forward to your next hotel booking! I did that for a couple hotels and its worth it! For hotels in Spain and Italy, you are better off booking directly through the hotel as they do more discounts/freebies as compared to the websites above! Usually, you’ll pay for the rooms upon checkout! So its pretty great! I reckon!

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