Some other tips for London:
1) It is impossible to stay lost in central London.
Even if you don’t know where you are, just keep walking and you’ll find either an underground station or can flag down a black cab and ask.
London black cab drivers are professional people (it takes about the same length of time to become a licensed cabbie as it does to get a bachelors degree) and they know where everything is.
So if you find you don’t know where you are, don’t panic, start arguing or ask random groups of lads standing on street corners for directions – you’re not lost. You just don’t currently know where you are.
2) Your hotel room is smaller than you expected – it’s not personal.
As a British visitor to the USA, it took me ages to get used to the fact that America wasn’t Britain with funny accents.
So, I would guess that the same applies to American visitors to Britain. You may book a stylish 4 or 5 star hotel expecting the same size and quality of room as you’ll get at home. You won’t.
All those fantastic looking London hotels used to be something else. That’s why they look fantastic. The problem is London has been around for two thousand years and there ain’t much room left so things get squeezed in.
That goes for hotels as much as anything else. Expect to find that your room is smaller and somehow shabbier than you would find for the same money back home. Embrace it as part of the ‘London experience’ but don’t start thinking you’re getting a particularly poor deal – you are probably not.
This kind of stuff can ruin a stay in a foreign country (remind me never to tell you about the so-called 5 star hotel I once visited in Oman), so it’s best to start with realistic expectations and enjoy the good stuff.