Greenwich, London

My lovely friend Andrea Weist was in town this past weekend. We have been friends since kindergarten and her mom even attended my parents' engagement party way back in the day. So we have a long history together. It was so nice to see her, as always. We decided to do a day out in Greenwich and the weather could not have been better! I had not been to Greenwich since 2003, when Charles and I lived in London for the summer during grad school while he did his summer internship for the first law firm he worked for. Back then I did all my site-seeing (at least during the week) by myself. So it was much nicer to see Greenwich with a friend the second time around. Here we are just off the water taxi in Greenwich. Her sister Cathy, who lives here, came with us too.

On the top of the hill you can see the Royal Observatory which is the home of Greenwich Mean Time and the Prime Meridian of the World.

Very large ship in a very large bottle in front of the National Maritime Museum.

The view from the Royal Observatory hill top out to part of London (Canary Wharf, to be exact).

Andrea is standing with a foot in each hemisphere at Longitude 0°0' 0” in the Meridian Courtyard of the Royal Observatory. It was so lovely to take my time for once (I had no children with me complaining they were bored) in the museum and actually read everything and learn about the scientific discoveries that changed our understanding of time and space. We got to see how the Astronomers Royal used to live and work at Sir Christopher Wren's Flamsteed House.

The bright red Time Ball on top of Flamsteed House is one of the world's earliest public time signals, distributing time to ships on the Thames and many Londoners. It was first used in 1833 and still operates today. Each day, at 12.55, the time ball rises half way up its mast. At 12.58 it rises all the way to the top. At 13.00 exactly, the ball falls, and so provides a signal to anyone who happens to be looking. Of course, if you were looking the wrong way, you had to wait until the next day before it happened again. We could have seen it drop but chatted too long over lunch in Greenwich, so we missed it. Guess we'd be some of those Londoners who would have had to wait for the next day. Before this time, only the richest people could afford to buy clocks and watches of their own. Most people relied on public sundials to tell the time. This led to different local times across the country, with clocks on the eastern side of the country about 30 minutes ahead of those in the west.
The difficulties created by everyone using their own local time eventually led to the creation of Standard Time based on the Prime Meridian at Greenwich.

Another view from the hill top. It was an absolutely perfect spring day.

Here is a closer view of that ship in a bottle.

I didn't get a good picture of the National Maritime Museum so I got this from the internet. It is such a lovely building.

This is the University of Greenwich which has two campuses, one in Kent and the other on the grounds of the Old Royal Naval College in the Royal Borough of Greenwich, London. It is the largest university in London by student numbers and the greenest in the UK. The university dates back to 1890. The buildings were originally constructed to serve as the Royal Hospital for Seamen at Greenwich, which was designed by Christopher Wren and built between 1696 and 1712. 

 

 

Here is a better picture from the internet. Gorgeous building! None of the buildings at the University of Utah looked like this! I want my money back....

Here is Andrea disguised as Lord Nelson in the National Maritime Museum.

Here is Andrea and I in front of Cutty Sark. The Cutty Sark is a British clipper ship, built in 1869. She was one of the last tea clippers to be built and one of the fastest, coming at the end of a long period of design development which halted as sailing ships gave way to steam propelled boats. Hooray for girls' day out with no children!!!