I'm happy to report we made it successfully across London without any damage to the car or the nerves of the occupants. It took us about an hour to drive nine miles from the east side to the west side, but it was never gridlocked and just a lot of traffic lights. We are now comfortably settled in the Parkcity Hotel in Kensington, which we've stayed in before and really, really like.
Big TV, too! It gets something like six German channels, which we are listening to as I write this. We think maybe if we listen to German TV long enough, it will just sink in and we'll wake up fluent. Well, we can dream.
But I should start with yesterday afternoon in Greenwich. In the early afternoon we walked down to the Royal Observatory, which is home to the Meridian Line that marks Greenwich Mean Time (GMT), the time zone by which all others are measured. This site, along with all of "Maritime Greenwich," is a World Heritage Site because it "symbolizes English artistic and scientific endeavour in the 17th and 18th centuries." Also, it's free!
This is not the Royal Observatory - just a church and another building on the way. The sun was out for the first part of our walk, so I had to take advantage.
The Royal Observatory and related buildings are surrounded by a huge and nice park. Unfortunately you have to climb a very steep hill to get to the Observatory - you can just see the top of it on the right of this photo.
View of Greenwich and the skyscrapers of Canary Wharf from halfway up the hill
Closer view of the same
In back is the O2 Dome, where David and his friend will be seeing Led Zeppelin in a few weeks! Unfortunately we don't know what the factory building in front is.
The Royal Observatory. The red ball on the top drops at 1:00 PM every day, apparently so ships can set their clocks by it.
Interior of the building above, with the bedroom of the main astronomer who lived here and made his observations in the 1800s. I forget his name and am too lazy to look it up, but I do remember that he was often sick from staying up late in the cold looking at the stars.
The Octagon Room at the top of the Royal Observatory, built mainly so that wealthy visitors could look through a telescope in posh surroundings
The big sight at the Royal Observatory - the Meridian Line at 0' 00" longitude.
As we learned in the attached museum, which is quite good, this line was part of the solution to the "Longitude Problem" that perplexed most of the world in the 1800s. It was very important to figure out one's position at sea, both to command the seas militarily and avoid shipwrecks. Latitude was fairly straightforward, using distance from the equator, but longitude was far more difficult, in part because there was no natural line. So they made one, here at Greenwich.
But then they still had to figure out how to know your longitude at sea, and this was such an important thing that a reward of £20,000 was offered to whoever could solve the Longitude Problem. That's the equivalent of £1,000,000 today. It was eventually solved, but I'm afraid that no matter how many signs I read in the museum, I didn't grasp exactly how the solution worked.
But I know it involved this beautiful clock somehow, which is called the H4.
For late lunch/early dinner (this is becoming a tradition for us) we tried out the Gourmet Burger Kitchen chain. They seemed to be based in New Zealand and have a huge range of burgers, chicken burgers, and veggie burgers.
Our burgers were delicious and HUGE. On the left is my Kiwi Burger (i.e. New Zealand Burger), which has a combo of beets, pineapple, egg and cheese. On the right is David's Mexican Burger, with salsa and such.
By then it was raining quite hard and nearly dark. We took a short walk down to the little visitor's centre of the Cutty Sark, a famous British ship that was sadly nearly destroyed by fire in May. It won't reopen until early 2009. Then we picked up cheese, crackers and fruit at Marks & Spencer and holed up in our hotel room and did basically nothing all evening. It was grand.
Today, after settling in at our new place, we walked down to the Natural History Museum. This is the one of the three excellent (and free!) museums next to each other in this neighborhood we hadn't yet visited - the others are the Victoria & Albert (art, artifacts and fashion) and the Science Museum (cars, computers, great stuff).
The Natural History Museum is housed in an amazing building that is absolutely huge and very beautiful. It was built in 1881 in a neo-Romanesque style and is covered inside and out with carvings with lions, monkeys, snakes and other animals. It has been dubbed "the Cathedral of Nature," and it really does look like a cathedral.
That's a Christmas market in front, oddly sponsored by British Airways along with an ice rink...
Huge portal around the entrance
Main hall
View from above of the Earth Hall
Dodo birds
Rodents of Unusual Size
A very ugly but important fish called a coelacanth. It was known from fossils but thought to be extinct until a live one was caught in 1938. Note its weird fins - it is believed to be an evolutionary link between fish and four-limbed land animals.
The Christmas Market all lit up as we left the museum
The next stop was just a few more blocks down - Harrod's! We can never visit this place often enough. And this time we realized we'd never ventured beyond the main floor (it has the Food Hall, after all), and did some major exploring of the other four floors.
The glorious "Egyptian Escalator"
Harrod's horse-brushes, part of the Riding department
Furniture department, which includes rooms devoted to Modern, Traditional, Contemporary and Antique furniture
The Chocolate Bar
The Christmas Room
Fancy-pants ornaments
I wanted to buy one of these stockings for a future tree, but didn't feel like standing in line, spending money, or packing more stuff, so I settled for a picture instead.
We had a light dinner at this counter in the Food Hall, called Harry Morgan's. It was established in 1948 and specializes in Jewish deli food.
We had their chicken soup (noodles for me, dumplings for David), which was quite good and really hit the spot on the cold evening. And lest you think we were too healthy, we followed it up with a hot glazed donut from Krispy Kreme, also in the Food Hall. Harrod's is just heaven. David said it was like Disneyland for food.
Then it was a rather long walk home, but it was enlived by a celebrity sighting! This probably won't be too exciting to most of you, but it was pretty darn cool for us. We saw Flavio Briatore, who is the head of the Renault team of Formula One racing. He's an Italian multi-gazillionaire who also brought the United Colours of Benetton company to the USA, owns a restaurant in London, and impregnated Heidi Klum in 2004. I once read a great article about his yacht in a British magazine.
We saw him very close to Harrod's, walking fairly slowly like he was just out for a stroll. He passed right by us going the other direction and David looked him full in the face. I didn't even notice him as I was unfortunately looking somewhere else. But after David excitedly said who it was, we turned around and followed him for less than a block, and I took this rather poor-quality picture.
This is how he looks from the front (pic from the Wikipedia article):
We were too shy to talk to him, but of course now we wish we had!
And that brings me up to date. Hooray! Tomorrow's tentative plans include Westminster Abbey (David hasn't yet been inside) and maybe the British Museum.
