Well here at DownUnderLondon we want to help you, so here are the top ten ways not to be a muppet, annoy everyone else in London and just stand out like a tourist!

Number 10

When using the tube, wait for people to get off the train before trying to get on.

Otherwise how do you expect to be able to squeeze on yourself?

Number 9

If your under 22 and are in a gaggle (5+) of foreign students, watch where the hell you are going.  Stop talking crap to your mates and going “oh wow its London” in three different languages and watch out for the people who actually know where they are going as they walk down the street

Number 8

Ok yes this one seems to confuse everyone when they first arrive.  When your taking an escalator stand on the right hand side.  Yes all those signs on the escalators really mean, don’t point out the sign and then continue to stand on the left side.  Even Muppets know better.

In case your wondering, no we don’t have any idea either, in the UK you drive on the left but stand on the right, does anyone know?

Number 7

Don’t walk around the city with a big furry UK flag hat on your head.  Seriously only Joey from Friends did that, and all his other friends said he was an idiot and they were right.  Honestly you won’t meet any royalty while your doing it, well if you really do please tell us and show us the photo. 

Number 6

Don’t smile and look too excited.

Yes London is a great place but look at all the people who live here, how many of them wander around with goofy smiles on there face?  Ok we probably are being a harsh here, but it is funny that all the people who look all excited and happy are the tourists, while the locals just look frustrated that the next train is at least 5 minutes away.

Number 5

In the tube stations, when you get to the top of the escalator or just past the tube gates, now is not the time to try and pull out your map and work out where you should be going.   Move away from the flow of all the people and then sort out what you want to do/where your lipstick is/which way it is to Covent Garden.

Oh and the same thing applies on the sidewalk/pavements as well, if you want to check something out stand to the side so every else can just keep on walking

Number 4

Your cellphone does not work Underground.

Well it may in the future if Boris the Buffoon has anything to do about it, but at the moment your phone does not work in a tunnel/underground.   However it’s always good for comic relief of the locals when the train goes underground and then you keep talking on your phone for five minutes before realising no one was listening to you.

Number 3

Yes there is a queue.

Whenever you are in a busy store, or lining up for an ATM, look around as more than likely there will be a queue of people lining up politely to get service.  They sure won’t like you if you try and cut in front of everyone, it might be the way things happen elsewhere, but it’s not the standard in the UK.

Number 2

It’s easier to walk than to take a train/tube, well in Central London.

This one is more a help than to stop you look muppet like, but it’s actually a lot easier to walk around Central London than you may think.  So next time you need to get somewhere try walking there.

Number 1

The number one way not to be a Muppet in London…

Well what’s your one?  Leave us a comment…

The two best site’s that I’ve found for checking out flights (and wished I had known about them when I first arrived!) are Skyscanner.net and Kayak.co.uk

Skyscanner check’s a number of airlines, but it’s good in that it includes the budget ones (e.g. Ryanair and Easyjet) in the searching. It has a number of great options if your living over here. You can get it to show a calendar view so if you want to go someone in particular but aren’t sure when you see which weekend (or days) are the cheapest to fly there and back on.

It also has another option (which I would have liked to use on a couple of weekends) where you just say I want to fly on these dates and it shows you which places are the cheapest to go to. While if you are finding it hard/expensive to fly to the place that you want to go to, use the Map option and look at nearby airports. It might be cheaper to fly to a nearby airport and then take a quick train to where you want to go.

Couple of drawbacks with the site though – the price’s aren’t real time, so you might find a cheap flight, but then click on the Check Flights option, that connects with the airline’s website and your 30 pound flight might then suddendly become a 80 pound flight. However it’s worth knowing that if your looking at some airlines (Ryanair in particular), they seem to change their flight prices several times over a day, and definitely over a week sometimes. This can be both increases AND decreases. While the second drawback is that those cheap flights could be flying out at 6am! So more a pain than anything else.

Kayak.co.uk as mentioned is another great site, though it’s orginally an American one (kayak.com) so it’s still developing the UK options. One great thing about Kayak is that as well as checking many different airlines it will also look at other stopover routes that might be available to you that can be a lot cheaper, either through the airline’s direct or through other Airline ticket pricing sites.

For example I was wanting to fly to Turkey for ANZAC day, and had left it a bit late.. only booking a week or two before ANZAC. So all the direct flights were quite expensive. However I found a flight going via Germany (as it flew with Lufthunsa). I checked out on the Lufthunsa and exactly the same flights would have cost me just over 1000 pounds on their website, booking through Kayak it took me to Cheapflights.com which had the same flights for only 300 pounds! How’s that for a saving!

Another great thing with Kayak is the slider’s that is has on the left hand side. So while it might give you plenty of options for some destinations, you can use the sliders so that it only show’s you flight’s that leave after 10am (so you don’t have to catch those stupid early morning flights). While you can do the same thing with the length of time you might like for stopovers.

There are of course all the other usual flight comparison type sites – lastminute.com, expedia.co.uk, opodo.co.uk etc

But remember it’s not all planes in Europe! If your ever going somewhere last minute, or have time up your sleeve and want a different type of journey, why not try a Train? The Seat61 website has a great wealth of information about this, or you can buy the book The Man in Seat 61: A Guide to Taking the Train Through Europe

I managed to get a last minute ticket to a World Cup Quarter Final in Berlin, Germany in 2006. Obviously lots of people were flying over for it. So it actually worked out cheaper (and much more of an experience) to take the train. Left from Waterloo station on the Eurostar on Thursday evening and after one change woke up around 7am a bit before we pulled into Berlin station! Definitely a different experience from the full body searches and limited luggage amounts allowed on most airplanes nowdays, I even got to have a shower on the train before I got off!

Good luck and cheap travelling!

p.s. If you book the Eurostar, watch out!  When you go to the site it charge’s you more if you say you are from Britain, the cheapest country to book trips from is New Zealand.  Seriously.  A newspaper printed that a return Paris to London will cost you 54 pounds if your Australian, and it’s 154 pounds if your British!