Wishing clocks more swift? Hours, minutes? Noon, midnight?

So now we're onto Wednesday.  I don't think any of you REALLY wanted to read a play by play of my life, but this blog is also doubling as my journal and when I'm doing cool stuff I like to be detailed.  Sorry everyone.  You don't have to read it in any case.

But Wednesday was Greenwich day.  We took the Tube through most of the city and then got off and hopped on a riverboat that took us up the Thames and right to Greenwich.

Here I am on the dock before we get on our boat.  See Big Ben in the background?

Anyway, the boat ride was pretty neat.  We just sat on the back deck and watched the city go by on either side of us.  It was a neat way to see the city, but admittedly a bit slow.  I'm just glad that the Thames doesn't stink as much as it used to.  We had a reading assignment about it in history right before we did this, and I'm not sure how good the timing was on that, because the subject was definitely on my mind as we were riding down the river.

But Greenwich was pretty cool.  We wandered around the National Maritime Museum that had some neat boats and navigational instruments like the ones we learned about in class and then we walked up the hill to the Royal Observatory to see the Prime Meridian.  Unfortunately when we got to the top of the hill they told us that we would have to pay ten pounds to go into where the official Prime Meridian was drawn onto the ground unless we had our group leader (aka professor) there.  We all thought that was pretty dumb and didn't pay to go in.  I just peeked through the fence and took a look at the line, which we had technically crossed while climbing the hill.  There was this really cool twenty four hour clock though outside the compound.

See, it was 11:20 when I took this picture.  Noon's at the bottom of the clock.

Anyway, it was pretty neat to be at the place where time essentially starts and to see the Prime Meridian.  After a rather lazy afternoon where we wandered down and bought sandwiches in a shop that gave us a rather amazing student discount and a nap on the grass we went back to the center.  I did homework for a while, and then that evening we went to see Lion King.

Lion King was amazing.  Like just as amazing as Cinderella, if not more so, in a different way.  There was so much light and color and the music was just so beautiful.  Some of their voices just made you melt.  Took me back to my California high school days when we wished that we were black women and could sing like them because there seems to be a natural quality to their voice that simply can't be done if you're born white.  And the costumes were fabulous.  It was so interesting to watch how they managed to combine a puppetry sort of animal with the human actor.  But seriously, it was so awesome.  My cheeks hurt from smiling by the end of it and I couldn't seem to stop because I was so happy.  

And that concludes Wednesday, which is May 4th.