Then we passed the Houses of Parliament, and I had a flashback to the day I got shown around them by an MP who took me for a sneaky fag at the foot of the clock tower, and how we had looked up at the endless tourists on the bridge taking their Big Ben photos, none of them thinking to glance down and get a shot of a politician sharing a Marlboro Light with a journalist.
Pall Mall: home to the Queen, the Oxford and Cambridge gentleman's club, the embassy of Kazakhstan and endless tourists transplanting themselves into these scenes of luxurious white empire with their selfie sticks.
Pall Mall: home to the Queen, the Oxford and Cambridge gentleman's club, the embassy of Kazakhstan, and endless tourists transplanting themselves into these scenes of luxurious white empire with their selfie sticks.
It's a font of an endless stream of tourist tat, produced to prove for its thousand Australian visitors a day that, as the song says, I've Been to Bali, Too.
"I would be in favour of a ban, because the endless stream of tourist traffic caused by the two coffee shops in the street adjacent to mine would stop.
Mostly they were just friendly — a nice change from many of the retail clerks we'd run into that day, weary after summer's endless stream of tourists.
If you pass by the entrance to the Vatican City, which sees up to 17,000 visitors a day, there is an endless line of tourists waiting to enter.
The proof is the endless stream of tourists, gawking, snapping photos and brazenly sitting on the stairway behind the "Sitting on stairway is strictly prohibited" sign.
The other afternoon endless scrums of tourists here jostled before the Caravaggios in the Church of San Luigi dei Francesi and the Basilica of Santa Maria del Popolo, feeding pocket change into the boxed light meters.
"I like New York," Vadim Biriukovich, at 14 the youngest member of the crew, said yesterday as an endless line of tourists waited to clamber aboard and hand him $15 for a Bat'kivshchyna T-shirt.
