Posted on 06/05/2012 10:56:24 AM PDT by C19fan
The boom to the economy that the Government hoped the Games would bring to the capital appears to become a bust with tens of thousands to tourists spurning the hiked prices, congestion and heightened security. While bookings for July and August are down by 35 per cent on last year other European capitals appear to be prospering from London’s gloom.
(Excerpt) Read more at telegraph.co.uk ...
Thanks for the info, and the Whitby shop is on my bucket list.
I’ve had no interest in the Olympics since the Cold War ended; it was a non-violent proxy war between “us” and “them”. Now they’ve become us, and we became them; I no longer look at anything “American” as having any relationship to me at all.
Update that to “the lovers are American”.
They have been going overboard with fear of terror and prep wackiness. Probably keeping some people away. Wall Street Journal had an article about it.
I’m sure that plays into it, no doubt.
I was also thinking this evening that we don’t really know how this measures up to other Olympics.
Are all hotel rooms generally booked by now? There is still time.
If you want to find good food, in Britain as more or less anywhere else, you don’t find it in the honeypot tourist destinations, where overpriced mass catering serves the lowest common denominator. Get out of London into the country, and with not a great deal of effort you will find food as good, at most levels of the gastronomic heirarchy, as anywhere else. The transformation of standards over the last few decades has been remarkable: not only the cooking, but also the quality of the ingredients. Of course, as everywhere else, it’s still possible to eat badly - but that’s no longer the norm, and hasn’t been for some time.
Every one of the criteria in that over-quoted quatrain is now false - with the possible exception of the Swiss lovers, for whom I cannot vouch.
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