Greenwich

With the weather looking considerably better today it was time to head off to Greenwich on a boat down the Thames River. The boat set off from Westminster, from where the London Eye, London Aquarium, Big Ben and the Houses of Parliament were all visible. Heading eastward, we passed London Bridge, the Tower of London (as shown here) and several other interesting attractions, some of which I'll be seeing closer up as I check them out individually during my remaining week here in London.
As you may know, Greenwich has a silent "w" as do seemingly all English locations that end with "wich"... it now makes me wonder how you're really supposed to pronounce "sandwich"!

Arriving at Greenwich, the first stop was the local Music and Video Exchange where I bought a silly amount of CDs and started to have my first worries about getting it all back to Australia! Thankfully with some creative packing techniques I should be OK, but I think there's still another one or two M&VE's to go so we'll see. The best thing in there that I was excited to get was Performance's Short Sharp Shock CDEP for 50p. I think (We Are) Performance are great so I was pleased to get this, especially considering I was under the impression that it was only released on 7" vinyl. Well there you go.

I had a quick look over the maritime aspects of Greenwich before deciding they were of not much interest and trekking uphill (with a silly amount of CDs slung over my shoulder) towards the Royal Observatory. The gardens on the way through were beautiful and very Autumnal. It was a steep walk up to the Observatory, so I was thankful that one of the first exhibits was a video with animation etc. so it was a perfect excuse to take a seat and rest for a few minutes. Inside the Observatory there were a few astronomical displays, including an old meteorite, and well as a whole lot of interactive stuff. It was nice and informative, but I already knew a lot of the information from countless readings of Arthur C Clarke and other science writers so I just aimlessly absorbed it rather than try to learn anything. There was a section devoted to the history of time somewhere in there but after having done the museum tour yesterday, I've kind of hit a wall in terms of having adequate appreciation for things of importance like this. It was back down (thankfully, down) to Greenwich Pier to get my return ferry. On the way I saw three cheeky squirrels in the park so that was nice. Unlike the one I saw in Edinburgh, I actually managed to get a couple of pictures though they're not great. Tired, I slouched back in the seat on the top deck of the ferry and enjoyed the return trip. We were on a different ferry for the return voyage, which meant I was actually able to get a photo of the earlier vessel, the Mercia, which had now been tied up for the evening. Back to Brixton, and I've loaded the photos onto the computer, burnt them all to CD, sorted out the CDs in a logical way conducive of transport to Leanne and Greg's and then back to Australia. Les is still out from a radio interview he did this afternoon with Steve Lamacq, so hopefully that went alright, and we'll see him back here soon so we can head off for his and Crissi's "thank you" dinner.