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Strong Euro? No Problem! (cont'd)

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If there's a Denny's in London, I don't want to know about it--I hate the idea of eating American fast food when traveling.

However, my favorite spot for a quick, hearty, and ultra-cheap bite is Belgo Centraal at 50 Earlham St (three blocks north of Covent Gardens), where you take an ultra-slow freight elevator down to a warren of rooms filled with long wooden benches and tables, waiters dressed a bit like ersatz monks , and there's hearty Belgian-style cuisine, such as sausages with mashed potatoes, roast chicken, pots of mussels, and wild boar sausages, plus lots of Belgian beers and ales. Best part is all the specials: from noon to 5pm, you pay £5.95 (about $11.50) for a basic meal plus glass of beer, then from 5pm to 6:30pm, you pay whatever the clock says when you order (so if you order at 6:15, you pay £6.15).

There's also Pollo on Compton St. in SoHo, a crowded Italian place serving portentous piles of pasta for pitifully low prices, and another of my faves is Wagamama, a basement Japanese noodle house with rapid-fire service and huge bowls of steaming noodle soups; it's a few blocks from the British Museum at 4 Streatham St.  

As far as sights for kids go, I'd say first off: skip the obvious ones. The Changing of the Guard bored me to tears at age 11 (still does), and Madame Tussaud's is a way, way overpriced house full of waxy mannequins of famous people the kids probably never heard of anyway. Much more exciting would be a Beefeater tour of the Tower of London (lots of good bloody history to recount, and they try to make it particularly entertaining for the lads and lasses). Take a boat ride out to Greenwich to see the magnificent Cutty Sark clipper ship, then picnic and play on the grassy lawns of the city park that leads up to the free Royal Observatory where they can set their watches by the official Greenwich Mean Time clock and have fun jumping back and forth between hemispheres along the Prime Meridian.

Kids might also enjoy romping about the stalls of Portobello Road flea market on a Sunday, climbing to dome of St. Paul's to gaze out over the city--or do the post-millennial version, a ride in the massive Thames-side London Eye Ferris wheel. And you know, even though it's a museum, all the mummies and gigantic Persian statuary and the cool mummified dude from the bog and the glasses of glittering Celtic gold and other awesome stuff inside the (totally free) British Museum tend to be a highlight of a London trip for kids of all ages.

And that's the Travel Show for this week, brought to you by the award-winning ReidsGuides.com, the Internet's best one-stop site for planning a trip to Europe.