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.
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!
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.