Yesterday we went to Greenwich to have a look around.
First we checked out the view of the Thames
The river Thames
Then we walked under the Thames using the Greenwich Foot Tunnel.
Greenwich Foot Tunnel
Once we got accross, and arrived in Greenwich, we stopped for lunch at Marks & Spenser (a posh grocery shop). £10 for a sandwich, a pasta salad, 2 small juices, 2 small bags of crisps (potato chips) and Sarahs English favorite chocolate, which I originally thought were called Original Walnut Whips, but now I think they might be called Walnut Original Whips.
Walnut Original Whip
For site seeing,we first went to see the Prime Meridian at the Royal Observatory. I got a photo taken with one foot almost on the East side of the world, and another foot well into the West side, and a third foot hanging out of my backpack, also on the West side.
Jake the Peg and the (Optimus) Prime Meridian
We also had a look at an interesting museum in the old Royal Astronomers house about clocks + seagoing chronometers, and how the first few royal astronomers had to spend 20 or 30 years mapping the moon and its exact position relative to the stars every night to help ocean navigation. One poor guy worked on it for 10 years, but his observations were to sloppy, and they had to be discarded. Sarah and her friend Jade were bored silly by this part, but I found it quite interesting.
Then we went to Queens House (a Queen from a few hundred years ago), where we looked at some art, a spiral staircase without a central column (the first of its kind in England!), and Sarah stood between some columns for a photo
Sarah and Greenwich park
And to round out the day we had a look in at the National Maritime Museum. My favorite bit here was the Stained Glass from the Baltic Exchange, which was moved to the museum in 1992, after a bomb attack destroyed the Exchange. The Swiss-Re Gherkin is built on the site where the Baltic Exchange used to be.