The Big Bus website is awful…it says you can get on at any of their stops and show your passes to the agent. So we get on at the Brooklyn bridge on a hot Saturday in the middle of summer. The driver doesn’t speak English, and keeps yelling two stops at me…two stop,two stops!!! Wtf, I speak English, Chinese, and Spanish. I don’t know wtf he is trying to say…finally it dawns on me that we need to get tickets in two stops. Are we able to ride there or do we have to get off?? Who knows. Finally, we decide to go try to find a seat, and he doesn’t try to stop us, so I guess it was ok.
Well, the top deck was full, so we were stuck inside. And what a bonus, the a/c was not working. The windows do not open so we are baking in an oven for the duration of the trip. There is supposed to be a narrated tour, but there is no overhead speaker. In entire bus, I saw one guy with some red earphones plugged into the ceiling...aha! But where to find the earphones? I made my way back to the front and a small box of them were on the floor. Oh thanks for telling us driver guy! It soon became apparent that the narration lended little information to the tour...much of it was friction' canned disco music! Ugh, it was so bad and we were so drenched with sweat that we got off less than halfway around the loop (most of the time the bus was stopped in traffic). We took the subway back to the hotel. Meanwhile, there are shills for this friction' tour everywhere...avoid at all costs.