Navigating the Underground

So last evening I decide to take myself to Covent Garden, becuase it's supposedly one of the trendy hot spots in London these days and I figure I can find a good restaurant there. And certainly I can manage the Underground, or the Tube, as they affectionately refer to the subway here. After all, I spent four months in England once upon a time (never mind that that time was 19 years ago), and by all accounts, I remembered it being pretty easy to traverse about London on the tube. So I step into the Charing Cross tube station right outside my hotel, by my 5 pound ticket, and proceed through the maze that lives underneath Trafalgar Square, where I'm staying. The station is so large, it takes me approximately 10 minutes just to walk to (and down to) the tube platform. But finally I'm there, having just missed the last tube, but wait another 3 minutes til the next one arrives. And then it's just a quick ride to my stop, Leister Square, where I proceed to ascend to the surface and arrive in Covent Garden! Yea - only 15 minutes and I've successfully gone from one London neighborhood to another. It was as easy as I remembered. I see bustling streets that appear to be filled with restaurants and bars and cafes and theaters (this is the West End after all), and I pick one to begin my jaunt. Two minutes of foot traffic later and I arrive in....Trafalgar Square. Granted, the opposite end of Trafalgar Square where I started from, but Trafalgar Square nonetheless. I sighed, turned around, found a nice Italian restaurant where I dined on spinach and ricotta ravioli with roasted plum tomato sauce and walked the five minutes back to my hotel. Come hell or high water, and tube stops be danged, tonight I WILL find a new neighborhood to explore.