Greenwich Mean Time

Last weekend was the Weekend of Greenwich! On an absolutely beautiful Saturday Annie, Dan, David, Eric, Matt and I wandered down to the Thames and hopped on board the Vallula for a ride down the river to Greenwich, which the Prime Meridian and Zero! Degrees! Longitude! call home. We tried to hop on board en masse, but the ticket people wouldn't let David buy a ticket because (so they claimed) they were "sold out." A likely story...here's our boat at the dock in Greenwich, where David (who was forced to take the train) joined us.

We walked to the Royal Observatory, strolled through the museum (very cool clocks), listened to a very good actor dressed in very goofy period clothes tell us the story of Zero! Degrees! Longitude! (did you know the Prime Meridian moved four times - all the way across the courtyard of the Observatory - before it was set in, er, lasers?) and then stood on the actual Grrrreenwich Mean Time Date Line itself, simultaneously in the Eastern and Western Hemispheres:



Greenwich is south of the Thames and just across from the far eastern reaches of London. I took a picture from the Observatory - you can see the Millenium Dome and the very tall buildings at Docklands and Canary Wharf. Yes, those puffy-looking floaty clouds are real.


And finally, we hiked about 280 meters to the southwest to the spot where Matt's GPS insisted zero degrees longitude was really located, and everyone stood on Matt's International Date Line, wholly in the Western Hemisphere: