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| entry created: Friday 18 June 2004, 6:10am (NZ time) | |
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| Location: Hayley's, Tooting Bec, London |
| Local time: Thursday, 7:05pm |
| Music: |
Walking and tube rides – seems to be what I spend most of my time doing while touring around London! On Tuesday I started off visiting the London Bridge, then the Tower of London (although I couldn’t be bothered paying the £14 entry fee to go inside), and then the London Dungeons (which I thought was a bit of a waste of £13, as the only real frights I got were from the girls screaming beside me). Back onto the tube and off at the Vauxhall stop, I checked out the MI5 headquarters (for those of you who don’t know, this is the UK’s secret service – think "Bond, James Bond"). Then I returned to the Knightsbridge area and revisited the Science Museum again (since I’d run out of time while visiting it on Monday), checked out Royal Albert Hall, Kensington Gardens (and the million-and-one people enjoying the grass and sunshine) and Kensington Palace (birthplace and childhood home of Queen Victoria – looked more like a block of flats really) and the Albert Memorial. Fell asleep on the tube ride home, but managed to wake up before my stop. Yesterday I headed out to Greenwich, where I strolled around the bustling village, had lunch in the park and saw the Cutty Sark clipper ship (a tea freighter launched in 1869). Then it was on to the ‘Queen’s House’, which was built in 1635 (!!) for Anne of Denmark, wife of King James I (the White House in Washington is based on this). Next door to that was the National Maritime Museum to check out the history of all things maritime (funnily enough). They had some incredible scale models, as well as hordes of screaming school children. And finally I walked up the hill to the Royal Observatory, the location of the atomic clock keeping Greenwich Mean Time (NZ is GMT + 12hrs) and the Prime Meridian, which describes 0° longitude and divides the globe into its eastern and western hemispheres. And I learnt a new old-English phrase for when you’re going crazy trying to get something done… “I’m workin’ out the longitude”. (it took many many years to calculate it and decide on the correct way to do it). Walking back to the train, I ended up crossing beneath the Thames river, through the Greenwich Foot Tunnel (370m long, 15m deep, and opened in 1902!) On the way home I happened across the Daily Telegraph Motor Expo at Canary Wharf, so got to check out some amazing cars. My favourite was the new Porsche Carerra GT, but I wouldn’t say no to the Ferrari 612 Scaglietti either. Today I had a hot date. I went shopping with Hayley’s Mum to help her buy a new PC. One thing that's been starting to bother me lately is the number of tourists who now seem to use their shitty cellphone camera to take shitty cellphone photos of important historical sites etc, rather than a real camera. Jeez. The weather is still really good and quite hot, but the sun doesn’t have the tanning abilities of the Caribbean one I’m used to, and consequently I can almost feel the tan dropping of me. Noooo!…  My first real live squirrel sighting… so cute!  Another tube station – I love these subway stations for the photo opportunites they often provide.  Playing around with the camera – I liked this resulting shot  London Bridge. Dunno who that dude is though.  The London skyline, taken from the Royal Observatory in Greenwich. That's the Queen's House in the middle, and the Maritime Museum to the far left.  Me, standing on both sides of the world at once (the prime meridian)  The Albert Memorial. Guess I started to like the solarisation effect!   The new Porsche Carerra GT… yeah baby! |
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