My last Complaint.

A Car Park.

I am really loving it back here but let me give one up for Los Angeles; I've had my moan about the coffee here and complained about the humidity.

Well there is nothing you can do about the humidity but sometimes people here let things happen without complaining and I think that's why the regular coffee is crap; someone should have said enough is enough but there are other things.

The price to park a car is ridiculous, the price of public transport equally so and the cost of mobile phone usage for people calling mobile phones is outrageous.

I think the later is a diabolical liberty and I'll come back to that.

I realise that cities like Los Angeles are built to accommodate a car but the car parks/parking lots there are subsidised by the shops. To park at my favourite place, The Farmer's Market, it is free for the first 2 hours; the same with the shopping centres. The select shopping area of Beverly Hills has free parking lots and you don't need to shop there to get it. You can stop for a pee free for the first two hours.

Sometimes you have to be validated but Beverly Hills has no strings attached as I mention.

Here - Edinburgh $6.75 per hour; Birmingham $6.75 per hour; Ipswich $6.75 per hour - London??? through the roof. How do you expect to have people come in to your shop and boost the economy without subsidised parking?

National Car Parks seem to run the whole thing and here is information from their Wilipedia Page:

National Car Parks (NCP) is the United Kingdom's largest private car park operator, with over 200,000 spaces across more than 700 locations in towns and cities, railway stations and at airports.

NCP also had a growing service business, but this demerged from NCP in 2007. It is called NSL Services Group, and was previously called NCP Services Group. They also operated a bus company in London called NSL Buses, and this was previously known as NCP-Challenger – that sounds simple doesn't it????

When I moved to Los Angeles 16 years ago the bus fare cost $1.25 to go all the way from Los Angeles to Santa Monica – recently they put that up to $1.35; there were a lot of protests.

By the way in Los Angeles they don't believe that because you live a mile from where you work that you should have to pay less to get to work than someone who lives 10 miles away; it's the same as that in Edinburgh but not London.

Which brings me to the biggest rip off I can see.

In Los Angeles, in fact the whole USA, you cannot tell by the number that you are dialling a cell phone/mobile phone. So it costs just as much to call that number as it does to any other number in the area code.

There is a myth that you have to pay for incoming phone calls to mobiles in America – you don't; the minutes come off your free minutes which most people have.

So a cell phone is just the same as a land line price wise. In the USA you can dial an 800 number free of charge from your mobile – in Britain that free 800 number becomes a prime number. Why? Because the equivalent to AT & T, British Telecom, won't do deals with the mobile companies.

The other big big rip off is that when you call a mobile number in Britain from abroad that becomes an expensive call too because you have to pay a tariff to the mobile phone companies.

So if you are in America don't call any number in Britain that starts with 78 – really 078 but you don't have to dial the '0' in International calling; if you do it will cost you a fortune. The phone companies here a ripping off the world.

That's it – no more complaining! Very humid here, I must say.