Greenwich

The day started as so many days do, with me hiding from my cleaning lady. My flatmate actually didn't like our old cleaning lady, so a new one started last week. I had actually thought the old one was great, but the new one is sooooo much better, I can sort of see now why my flatmate wanted this new cleaning lady. She is so awesome. She not only cleans the entire flat in amazing detail (dusting in-between the books?), but also even makes my bed and folds any clothes I leave out.

Of course though, I was confused when the cleaning lady left, she actually gave me a hug and a kiss. Ummm...okay, kind of weird, but I'll go with it... I must say I have a lot to learn from my flatmate, who really seems to know how to handle the hired help! I think this is really the true indication of how I'm a middle class person learning to deal with upper class life, as I'm just perplexed about how to behave when it comes to having people working for you. It's not that I feel guilty about having somebody clean for me (in fact, quite the opposite, as I feel I'm doing a good thing to give this Polish woman a job, and I'm happy to pay her to do something I don't want to do), but it's all a bit weird when you're paying someone, you know?

After the cleaning lady left, we headed out to Greenwich, the home of the Prime Meridian (which is actually right in Zone 2 in London, despite it sounding like a separate town entirely). Took a boat out there, the Thames Clipper, which is normally a commuter boat along the Thames. It was kind of cool to see London from the Thames, and for just £3, it was a lot cheaper than one of those tourist riverboats!

In Greenwich, took a tour of the Royal Observatory (where apparently no real scientific work was ever done, it was just a nice place for royalty to go play at being astronomer), and learned a lot about the relationship between clocks and determining latitude. Apparently pendulum clocks are the most accurate for keeping time, but on a rocking ship they were useless, since the rocking of the ship cancelled out the movement of the pendulum. So there was this huge contest to figure out how to keep accurate time that wasn't affected by a rocking ship, which was won by the guy who was buried in the churchyard we visited yesterday.

We also got to see the Prime Meridian, which was really funny because there were all of these people lined up on it. And given that British people just LOVE to queue, I realised how fantastic it was that they'd decided to put the Prime Meridian in England, because where more perfect a place to have the world's first line than in the place full of people who love to line up?

At this point, we were getting hungry, and I remembered a great pub we'd gone to with my hash, so we went down to the riverside and grabbed lunch at the Yacht. Even though I hadn't eaten there before (only had their 77 pence lime-and-soda-waters), the food was good, the service was outstanding, and it was all good.

Then went to the Queen's house to check out some maritime art, but they were closing up early, so by 5 PM it seemed about time to head home. We first went for a walk across the underground foot tunnel, which was over 1,200 feet long, over 50 feet underwater, and smelled kind of musty to be honest (but refreshingly free of urine, which is unfortunately common in many urban pedestrian subways). And it really blows when the elevator at the other end is broken and you need to walk up a zillion steps to get out.

Finally took the boat home, got back to my flat, and crashed just about straightaway, we were all so tired after all of the fresh air and exercise!