Day 2 - Mar 6, 2013 Last updated: 3/31/13 8:00pm PT
We spent the morning walking along the South Bank of the River Thames. We quickly went through the Borough Market. Not much was open when we were there. Also stopped in the Tate Modern Art Museum for a few minutes. We met up with Carrie for lunch, then parted ways as Carrie had school and a prior engagement.
From the South Bank, a view of St. Paul’s and the Millennium Bridge, as we were standing in front of the Tate Modern art museum.
Shakespeare’s Globe, not the original and not the original location. This is a modern reproduction built in 1997. Not sure now whether it was even worth the picture. I didn’t think it was that new.
The only time we saw the tower that holds Big Ben was from Trafalgar Square. It’s there, in the distance.
In the afternoon, Denise and I went to Greenwich and stood on the prime meridian, we saw The Queen’s House (an old Queen’s house, not the current Queen’s house), and saw a little of the maritime museum.
The Cutty Sark, built in 1869, one of the fastest clipper ships of its day.
The Queen’s House, a royal residence built in 1619 in Greenwich.
At the Royal Observatory, built in 1676, you can stand on the Prime Meridian (longitude 0°), where the eastern and western hemispheres are divided. They want you to pay £7 each to enter the ‘Meridian Courtyard’, so you can take your picture standing in both hemispheres, but you can do that for free, just down the hill from the entrance to the observatory, behind an iron gate. We walked all over looking for this free spot, because we knew it existed, but there are no signs. Finally we found it. We thought you’d have to walk far to find it, but it is right in front of the observatory.
When we left Greenwich, we walked under the Thames. A tunnel was built under the river in 1905 (or 1902 depending on your source). The dome is the entry to the tunnel. There is a matching dome on the other side. The Cutty Sark is to the left of the dome.
On our way home from dinner, Denise and I got separated on the Tube. She made it on to the train (we were transferring from one Tube line to another) and the doors closed with me still on the platform. I imagined an episode of Seinfeld where we chased each other around the subway system for hours trying to reconnect. That didn’t happen. I waited less than a minute for the next train. We meet up at our hotel’s stop. Not a very exciting story, since nothing went wrong, but we got a laugh out of it. (I never learn – this incident would repeat itself once when we were out with Carrie, where Denise and Carrie were happily on their way and I was left standing on the platform waiting for the next train).