Last full day in London

To finish off our stay in London, we had a bit of an eclectic day. It started with a walk across the new millenium bridge over to Shakespeare's Globe Theatre.


Except, it was raining and the globe is an outdoor theatre... so we walked next door to the Tate Modern museum instead, mostly to stay dry. In there, we saw a couple classic Mondrian pieces (did you know? he never used green), as well as some boxes and things that were just a bit too abstract for our tastes. But, it was very entertaining nonetheless. If you ever have time to kill in London (and you like art), I'd recommend the Tate.

Next, we headed off to the Google office to meet up with Sam for lunch. It's conveniently located next to a tube station, however, it's in the middle of the block on the other side of the street. You could either walk out of the way to either of the crosswalks, or run across the street and hop over the metal fence along the way--we chose the crosswalk due to safety concerns. We noticed here that cars don't really stop for pedestrians, and some of the intersections do not make it easy for the pedestrians to figure out when they should walk. For example, there's this one fairly busy intersection that's currently under construction. There is no walk signal on either side of the crosswalk, and you can't see the traffic lights for the cars going either direction from the sidewalk so you can't see who has the right of way. We basically guessed and almost got run over by the right turners.

Anyway, back to lunch with Sam. The office is located on Floors 3-5 (which is really Floors 4-6 because the first floor is the Ground floor) of the building. It has a similar feel to that of the New York office, so that was cool...and their telephone rooms are in the shape of a london phone booth:


And for those wanting proof that Sam did make it through immigration this time around, here's a picture of him in front of one of the Google London posters:


After spending some quality time with Sam, we headed off to Greenwich. You might know the name from a common phrase: GMT. Yep, it's the home of the prime meridian. We briefly stood astride the two hemispheres, and then realized that it's a fairly arbitrary choice of lines.


Greenwich is a quaint little town just a stone's throw away from the ultra modern skyscrapers of the Canary Wharf area. It was raining, so meandering about town wasn't exactly the best idea. We did find possibly the quirkiest part of our trip so far, the fan museum. Jerry is a big fan of fans, so it was fun. They had an exhibition on fans and fashion through the last few hundred years. Finally, we had some tea at a very nice tea house up a hill there.


Tea is a great afternoon staple; we should bring this back to the states with us. Anyway, off to Manchester tomorrow; the weather's supposed to pick up, and we're looking forward to it.