Greenwich -- We Had a Mean Time

Because our passports are due to expire soon, we sent them to the US Embassy here in London to be renewed. They've been gone for nearly three weeks now; I've been told we'll be getting our new ones within the next several days. But it is surprisingly disconcerting to be in a foreign country without a passport. What if someone in the US needed us? What if there were an overthrow of the UK Government and we had to evacuate? What if British Airways had a one-week-only fare sale to Greece that we couldn't take advantage of? Thankfully, none of these things have happened, so we're OK. But we did have a free weekend and with no passports we decided to travel somewhere that didn't require them. We spent the weekend in Greenwich. Greenwich is a borough of London best known for being the location of the Prime Meridian (0 longitude) and home of Greenwich Mean Time. It is located in the southeastern part of London, on the southern bank of the River Thames. It houses the Royal Observatory, the Royal Maritime Museum, and the former Royal Naval College (now the University of Greenwich). All three of these sites are collocated around the expansive Greenwich Park. Our first stop was the former Royal Naval College. There is a beautiful chapel and this "Painted Room" designed by Christopher Wren as the dining hall for the sailors.
While there, we learned some British maritime history from this fellow, playing the role of Samuel Pepys, a famous diarist of the 17th Century.
We left the Naval College and walked through the park and up the hill to the Observatory which dates back to 1675. Famous astronomers have conducted research in aid of navigation and time measurement here for hundreds of years, and to this day the red ball (above) is dropped from the crossbar to the building's roof at exactly 1pm GMT daily to allow boats on the Thames to synchronize their clocks. The Observatory became the site of the zero degrees longitude line, the reference point from which mariners everywhere determine their east-west position on the globe. Here I am with my right foot in the Eastern Hemisphere and my left in the Western Hemisphere:D was interested in all of the clocks, telescopess, and precision measurement tools on display outside and inside of the Observatory. We went back down the hill and toured the Maritime Museum, where we saw (among other things) the waistcoat the famous British Navy hero Admiral Nelson wore when he was killed by a musket shot on board HMS Victory during the battle of Trafalgar in 1805. British naval history is impressive, and the exhibits at the museum helped me to understand how the British Empire grew to be so vast. Greenwich is also the home of London's O2 Arena, the new state-of-the-art concert arena where D saw the Rolling Stones in August of 2007. You enter the enormous structure and are greeted by an outer ring that looks like a huge shopping mall -- containing a movie theatre, shops, a small indoor ski/sled hill, and 25 restaurants -- before you even get to the concert venue further inside. We went to see the arena, and found ourselves amidst tens of thousands of girls...as we were there the night of the New Kids on the Block concert! That was particularly funny to us, because you might remember that we actually ran into the very same New Kids at a restaurant here in September. We didn't have any interest in the concert, but we did sit at a bar there to watch the Manchester United/Tottenham match on TV. On Sunday morning, we drove just east of Greenwich to see the Thames Barrier -- constructed in the 1980's as a defense to flooding of the city of London. It's a flood barrier made up of rising gates, as shown in this one-sixth sized model:that can be rotated into place when tidal surges are predicted. In this picture, you might be able to see that one of the gates, to the right between the two yellow arms on the large stainless steel pillars built across the river, is up and blocking the flow of the river (as all would be in the event of a surge):while the gate at the left remains down. It was a fun site for engineering geeks like us. And our final stop of the trip was at the nearby Bluewater Mall, one of the largest shopping malls in England. It's a true "American-style" mall, indoors with anchor stores, restaurants, etc. It looks like any US mall, but with UK retailers. It was packed on a gray rainy day -- you wouldn't have known that this country is in a recession if you had seen all of the shoppers!