Saturday, September 29, 2012

Greenwich and Thames Boat Tour

Continuing my busy weekend was a trip and walking tour of Greenwich.  We took the train into London Waterloo and met the tour guides.  From there we took the train to Greenwich, and rode on the oldest bit of passenger railways in the world! The city itself was quaint and is most famous for being a getaway for past royalty. The prime meridian is also located in Greenwich, and that is where there is "zero time" and divides the earth into two hemispheres. There is also a great "painted hall" that depicted Henry VIII,  the King of England who changed the religion of England from Catholic to Anglican. We then explored a gift shop, and hit up Starbucks and the Greenwich Market.  I would have liked to spend more time in the market, because they had some really cool and interesting things, but we had to be back to catch our boat. We boarded for the boat tour along on the Thames, which was really cool.  We traveled in towards London and got to see everything along the river.  After being on the open air boat for about 75 minutes (it was quite chilly!), we landed at Westminster Pier, right across from the London Eye and right next to Big Ben and went across to a street festival at Jubilee Park.  We had some delicious food and ice cream at the festival and watched some street performers.  I had this really good pork sandwich with homemade applesauce on it (weird, but good!),  and got to try some of the street vendor ice cream.  Their ice cream tasted like more like whipped cream than ice cream! It was strange, but I liked that it.  We headed home early so we could get some rest before we head to Brighton beach early tomorrow morning to have some "real" fish n' chips!