Greenwich

Hello again everyone! I will hopefully be posting a little more frequently from this point forward (the format in which we need to upload photos is quite time consuming and a real pain). For this post I wanted to highlight one of the student assistant socials (trips) that we went on. It was a boat ride down the Thames (pronounced Tems) to Greenwich to check out the surrounding area like the Royal Naval College, Prime Meridian, and Royal Observatory - among other things. We got off to a bit of a late start but after that things ran pretty smoothly. This is another one of those highly recommend trips - although I feel like I'm going to be saying that a lot this semester. I would add to this though that Greenwich is definitely one of those trips where you want to go early and on a nice day. Especially by boat (you can take the tube and the DLR which seems to be a shorter ride) the trip takes a good bit of time and with the winter sunset at about 4:30pm GMT(Greenwich Mean Time - how awesome is that?!) it gets dark and cold early. We didn't get a chance to check much of what Greenwich has to offer after spending the majority of our time at the (awesome) market with great foods (sorry for no photos of that I was too busy stuffing my face with delicious international cuisine) and souvenirs and then up on the hill where the Royal Observatory is situated. The observatory itself costs money to enter -I think it was £18- so we didn't end up going in which is where you can see the really cool statue and line dedicated to the Prime Meridian (the line that splits the east and west hemisphere) which is the featured photo of this blog post. You can however see it from the otherside of a gate which is how I got the photo. However, do not dispair! You can still straddle the line if you pay close attention. If you are facing the observatory and Prime Meridian line from the outside of that gate, and turn right so now you are facing the path leading down the hill on your left hand side there's this little fence/turnstile thing that is always unlocked, and once through there's a line on the wall and path marking the Prime Meridian which is how we got some of the photos below! All in all definitely go to Greenwich but dedicate a full day to it, I myself will be going back later in the semester when the days are longer and warmer.