Thames River Cruise, Greenwich, Royal Observatory

Saturday, 17 April 2010

I woke up with the idea of going to London this Saturday, but with no clear plans. As usual, this took me to Guildford train station after a quick breakfast. By the way, I am experimenting with different types of traditional cheese :) As you may know, cheese is a favourite food of mine. I'll talk about cheese in a separate blog soon.

After a breakfast of a big chunk of cheese, some nicely brewed earl grey tea, and black olives along with wholemeal bread (this is what the British call the wheat bread), I took my way to the station on foot and arrived there around 11:30am. Got on the fast 11:35am train to London Waterloo station... After a usual train trip (of scanning people around and staring outside), I arrived to London and walked to the riverside. Basically, I followed the crowd and found myself near the Thames River and the London Eye. It is a big fair wheel just beside the river, I think one of the famous ones in Europe. I didn't get on it, because there was a long queue (British call it a "queue", not a "line") . There, I was just roaming around and looking at a couple of people making some shows to earn some money. There were a couple of good ones, mostly entertainers were wearing interesting costumes and playing some sort of a character: a pirate, a robot etc.

While watching them, I got the idea of making a river cruise. Luckily, there was a pier close by. I got on the boat after a 20 minute wait. It was a guided river tour and stopped at Westminster, where the parliament building and Big Ben clock tower are located. The tour I got was a round trip one going all the way to Greenwich, and I decided to complete the tour rather than taking off the boat at Westminster, because I had already seen that area.

I called my friend Utkan on the phone when I got to Greenwich. I was normally thinking of not getting off the boat and completing the round trip back to where it first started. But, Utkan recommended me to take a look at Greenwich area, and so I did.

Greenwich is a cozy small town with lots of pubs, restaurants, shops, and of course, people. There is a large park there, which houses National Maritime Museum and Royal Observatory House. I decided to go to the observatory. After all, that is what Greenwich had to be about :)

The observatory was a single building and was also the house of a British astrologist, John Flamsteed . I learned about this scientist's life a bit and read stories about how astrologists coped with the famous Longitude Problem, a problem of marine science: basically shipmen had hard time figuring out the correct longitude, although they could correctly calculate the latitude.
The museum shows charts of the night sky showing stars and how shipmen used to find their position accordingly. Also, many original clock designs that can calculate the correct marine-time in a ship can be seen at this museum. I learned that various disastrous events at the open sea gave a push to studies like that, which made Royal funding available to scientists.
Flamsteed had a very little income, though. One surprising fact was that 3/4 of Flamsteed's works were copied without his permission by none other than the famous scientist Sir Isaac Newton. I thought: maybe Plagiarism was not well-defined at those times ;)

I went back to the pier at Greenwich to complete my trip after passing through a beautiful park full of people lying on the grassland with their families and having fun. It was a sunny and nice day on that Saturday. The boat trips back to London however were all over by the time I arrived back to the pier, so I tried to find the underground station. After seeing that the light train system was out of service on that particular day, and since I didn't want to take a bus, I decided to wait for another boat company's next trip. Then, I found out that people were going into an old roundish building just beside the river and taking steps down. I followed them with the hope that I would find something interesting. After going a big number of steps of some sort of "curling" stairs, I was in a tunnel! This was a tunnel under the River Thames. I put on my coat and started walking through the tunnel after I found myself in a similar building, with curling steps going up. I was outside finally, the place is Island Gardens at the opposite side of the Thames.

In Island Gardens, I decided to go to Canary Wharf and then use the underground towards central London. Canary Wharf is basically the towncentre (business centre) of London with the HSBC and the Citibank towers). I started walking but I found myself in the middle of nowhere, a feeling I got in downtown Los Angeles. I saw two people approaching to me and asked them about the underground station. They wre happy to help me find my way and we walked to the station together, and after 5 minutes I was at the station.

Canary Wharf station is a big underground station, it must be crowded with people during the weekdays. I took the Jubilee line (one of the lines of London underground) and changed lines at Green Park station. This time, I was at the Piccadily Line which took me to Piccadily circus. I thought maybe I could catch a theatre, but I was too late. It was around 8:30pm and the last shows had already started. So I decided to just look around. First, I had a Falafel pita sandwich as dinner and wandered around a bit, and then headed to Waterloo, where I got on the Guildford train ...