British Museum, Thames Cruise, Greenwich and the London Eye. Oh and Westminster Abbey too.

I have been a bit slack on Blog posts so I'll try to keep up. On Friday we went to the British Museum and saw an exhibit on Hadrian, one of the emperors of Rome. It was a very big and grand museum, and the exhibit on Hadrian was long and full of information. There were lots of artifacts - Statues, Busts, Pillar tops... the list goes on. There were also free displays which made up the rest of the building. we saw the original Rosetta Stone, which had a decree written in Greek, Egyptian script and Hieroglyphs . It was the first piece of evidence discovered that had Hieroglyphs written alongside another language already known, and as such lead to the cracking of Hieroglyph code. There was also an Easter Island statue which funnily enough was from Easter Island, where these statues were carved and erected thousands of years ago by natives to 'watch over' the island. The statue was about 2 meters tall. Also next to it was a face... a synthetic face with nothing inside as if it were a mask, but it was very big. Weird.

The next day we went on a river cruise down the Thames river to Greenwich. On the way we passed The Globe Theatre (well, a recreation of it - the original was destroyed), where Shakespeare primarily performed his plays. Greenwich was fascinating. For those who don't know, it is pronounced 'Grenich' (like spinach) and is where zero degrees longitude is located. Unlike latitude, which has a position set by the earth's equator, longitude has no real 'origin', so they decided to place it at Greenwich, where a lot of work on time and clocks was done. There was a fascinating exhibition there, showing various developments in keeping time, from pendulum clocks up to GPS systems in the 21s century. There were some amazing clocks on display, but unfortunately we could not take photos.

After the tour we caught 'the tube' (london underground) back to the London Eye, and hitched a ride.

The view was very good. We timed our flight perfectly, getting sunlight when we took off and landing at night time, giving us the best of both worlds.

Finally, today we went to Westminster Abbey for evensong. The choir and organ sounded absolutely spectacular, with an 8 second or so echo. Later that evening we found the TARDIS - see the web album.