Greenwich

Low on funds but high on life, we headed south east of London to the lovely little suburb called and World Heritage Site - Greenwich.

Going completely against the grain of our other travels, we had done very little research on Greenwich preferring to show up and see what happened. We arrived at the Information Centre and were surprised at how hard out it was, we played around with a few exhibits like the Knights armour and then bought a map to help us on our journey.

Greenwich is best known for its maritime history and as giving its name to the Greenwich Meridian (0° longitude) and Greenwich Mean Time (GMT). The town became the site of a Royal palace, and was the birthplace of Henry VIII and Elizabeth I. The palace fell into disrepair during the English Civil War and was rebuilt as the Royal Naval Hospital for Sailors by Sir Christopher Wren under the orders of William and Mary.

These buildings became the Royal Naval College in 1873, and they remained an establishment for military education until 1998 when they passed into the hands of the Trinity College of Music.

Admiral H.S Bennie...the silver fox aka Granda would of been proud!

We wandered around the Royal Naval College and we were both really impressed with the architecture, especially in the Painted Hall which was quite different from any of the Palaces and Churches that we had seen.

We were also impressed to find out that Pirates of the Caribbean 4 is being filmed there next weekend! So we took a few photos of the set they were building around the Naval College and we are going to see if we can spot them in the movie - coming soon to a cinema near you...

Hamish was very excited about all the references to Lord Nelson, Collingwood and Trafalgar and it meant that we ended up taking a lot of photos….

After the Royal Naval College, we headed into the little town in search of some lunch. We found the markets and had a wander round, we had issues finding a place for lunch but eventually found a pub The Horse and Castles where we had a Sunday roast and people watched. It was very English and ok.

Then we headed up a hill (the first time we had done that in London) to the Royal Observatory. There were so many people up there, quite amazing as what they were all trying to see was just a line. We got swept up in the excitement as well though and queued up to get the cheesy shots. It took some explaining from Hamish but Louise finally understood what the Meriden line actually is.

Lous little toes are on the line - 0°0' 0''

Apparently back in the day, the watches they made for people used to run out of sync by about as 30 minutes everyday, so the Royal Observatory used to charge people to get their watches put on the right time, a nice little money earner.


We scooted through the rest of the Royal Observatory and found the Weller Astronomy Exhibition - Dad I didn’t know we had Astronomers as ancestors???!!!

We also found the statue of Wolfe, now this may be crazy but is this where the line “What’s the time Mr. Wolfe?” comes from??? We think so.

We finished our day with a stroll to the DLR station back home to Fulham. We felt the Greenwich was a nice little town full of surprises and will go back next summer.

Highlight #1: The Royal Naval College - a set of really cool buildings, and it was nice to be reminded of the sea even though we weren’t on the coast!  
Highlight #2: The monument to New Zealand naval officers, nice one.  
Lowlight: The famous ship the Cutty Sark (which Granda may have sailed on) being closed for renovations. 
Interesting fact: The GMT convention was internationally recognised in 1884, and Wellington is 174 degrees west of the Prime Meriden line.

Paris - Day Four

After the first proper nights sleep in ages, we awoke to light showers! Not to be deterred we packed up our bags and checked out of our apartment and headed back to Gare du Nord to put our luggage in storage for the day. This proved difficult, mainly because they lied on the map about where the luggage lockers were and they hid them from us.

Anyway we were shortly back in action and back in the city centre in line at the Louvre. We had briefly cycled through here on our biking tour but this time we got to see the glass pyramid structures up close. The Louvre was formerly the Royal Palace before Louis decided to move to Versailles to get away from the scum of the common people. There was massive controversy when the glass pyramids were installed in the courtyard by French President François Mitterrand in 1983, but the number of visitors to the museum doubled in the years following it so I guess he has had the last laugh.

The line wasn’t that long and we quickly found ourselves underneath the glass pyramid looking around at the millions of people and all the possible directions to go in, it really is enormous. It was like something out of a movie…say Di Vincie Code. We decided to head to the Mona Lisa first, just so we didn’t forget :). It was pretty amazing to see it after only seeing it in books for so long, but it is really small! We navigated our way around the hundreds of tourist parties and got this great shot.

We saw heaps of other Leonardo’s works, definitely awesome seeing the paintings Lou studied in Art History live and up close. Hamish enjoyed it but didn’t find any pictures of mortorbikes but did enjoy the Roman sculptures of warriors. We did a power tour of the rest of the museum, seeing lots of cool sculptures and other works of art from around the world.

By lunch time, we were museum-ed out and journeyed to our last stop on our itinerary - Montmartre. The tube stop we got off at was located in quite a rough neighborhood, and we didn’t really know what we were doing but if in doubt keep walking. We stopped at a bakery for lunch - another filled baguette….getting really sick of these by this stage.




We kept winding around the hill that had lots of pretty apartments with flowers spilling out the windows, until we came across the Saint Pierre de Montmartre church which is supposedly where the Jesuit order of the priests was found. This was pretty cool, but we pressed on until we found the village bit of Montmartre, we were confronted with heaps of artists that wanted to sketch us but we brushed them off and headed for another café where tried crepes for the first one. In most probably a psychological backlash against Sally Weller who forbade the consumption of Nutella when Lou was small, we ordered the Nutella variety and probably about 1 cup of Nutella got stuffed into this crepe and melted - in a word, amazing. Half of it ended up on Lous face though. 

 Feeling slightly sick we went up to the main church on top of Montmartre - the Basilica of the Sacré Cœur. This was built in 1876 to honour the French victims of the 1871 Franco-Prussian War. Its white dome is a highly visible landmark in the city like the Eiffel Tower and the Arc du Trimophe. The church was really beautiful, and it was a nice change that you couldn’t take photos inside and it made it feel more like a church. 

The area of Montmartre as the reputation of being the arty, creative part of Paris, and this has its origins because Montmartre was outside the city limits, free of Paris taxes and the local nuns made wine. We then sat on the steps and admired the view, which included one of the best street buskers we had ever seen doing tricks with a soccer ball, as well as probably the worst street performer we had ever seen - Canadian Dan.

By this stage we couldn’t take any more in so we decided to head back to the train station and have an early dinner and wait for the Eurostar home. We had a nice dinner at a café on the street, sitting outside people watching (the French line up their tables and chairs all facing the street so when you walk past you feel like you’re in a zoo!). We then collected our bags from the storage lockers and began the wait for our train, luckily Louise had packed part of her birthday present from Sally and David and we passed the time playing the World’s Greatest Trivia. Unfortunately Hamish won by one point and so this put a dampener on the entire holiday although Lou can gain merit for coming so close to a true genius.

We were welcomed back to London with freezing temperatures, pouring rain and tube strikes, but we still went to bed with smiles on our faces. Best holiday ever!

Highlight: Seeing the Mona Lisa and other famous works of art, it really is weird seeing them up close.
Lowlight: Getting a disappointing baguette - you just think that all food in France is going to be amazing.  
Interesting fact #1: Many artists had studios or worked around the community of Montmartre such as Salvador Dali, Claude Monet, Pablo Picasso and Vincent van Gogh.
Interesting fact #2: Nearly 35,000 objects from prehistory to the 19th century are exhibited in the Louvre, over an area of 60,600 square metres.

Paris - Day Three

Another beautiful Parisian day dawned and this was the day we were going to visit Versailles, the site of the one of the most famous palaces in the world however not before a nutritious breakfast of croissants and chocolate pastry (again!). Versailles was the dream project of Louis XIV. He lived in the palace until his death in 1715, and then his son Louis XVI lived there with his extravagant wife Marie Antoinette until they had their heads chopped off in the Revolution –ouch!.

The size of the estate is quite massive, and consists of the main palace, huge gardens, Louis’s summer house and then Marie Antoinette’s own palace. The eye catching golden gates were originally made of pure golden leaves and were torn down during the revolution were only replaced in 2008 at the cost of £4 million pounds.

Having seen a few Royal Palaces in our time, we whipped through the palace itself relatively quickly, we were surprised that you could take photos of the interior of the palace as you couldn’t in other palaces we had been in. 

We made it out into the brilliant sunshine amongst the mean sculpture fountains and wandered through the gardens. The palace officials had installed hidden speakers in the hedges of the gardens that played French classical music so you really felt like you were in a movie, promenading about.

We found lunch at a little café hidden in a maze and lay on the grass and had another picnic. The gardens furthest away from the palace were open to the public and many French families had set up camp for the day with their lunches, scooters and bikes. We wandered off to the other half of the estate where Marie Antoinette’s apartments and Louis’s summer house were.

These were basically scaled down versions of the main palace and had their own pretty gardens. We kept walking and stumbled across this little model village called the Hameau which was where the farmers lived whose produce fed the many people in the surrounding palaces. This was a definite highlight of the day, the village had been restored to what it would have looked like in 1789, the houses had thatched roofs and enormous vegetable gardens (Dave you would have been blown away), a little pond with the biggest carp we had ever seen, and a little model farm with rabbits, pigs, sheep and goats. It even had its own vineyard! 

After this excitement, we were wandering around trying to find our way back, getting more and more tired and thinking that we were going to be lost in the gardens for ever, and they would find our half rotted skeletons in a hedge. But we eventually found our way out and made our way back to the train, utterly exhausted.

That night we decided to try one of the local bistros around our hotel and a really nice Italian meal and shuffled back to our bed with aching feet. 

Highlight: The little farm village at the Palace - you could actually imagine yourself living there, just gorgeous.  

Lowlight: The variety of rules that the security guards like to impose, sometimes Hamish wasn’t allowed a backpack and sometimes he was, bizarre. 

Interesting fact #1: The total cost of all renovations made to the palace over the last 400 years total approximately $US2 billion dollars. 

Interesting fact #2: Marie Antoinette never actually said “Let them eat cake”, but it still sounds cool if she did. 

Interesting fact #3: Before Versailles the French Royal family lived in another famous French build the Louvre which was tomorrows adventure.

Paris - Day Two

Day two rolled around far too quickly, we stumbled out of bed and went back to the Notre Dame for the meeting place for our next tour, but this time on two wheels. We also managed to squeeze in some breakfast (croque monsieur - ham and cheese toasties to you guys) and the best coffee Louise had ever had in her life.

Not the usual bike Hamish is used to riding

The biking tour had a slow start but eventually we were off, whizzing around (well Lou was doing her best) the back streets of Paris with a very informative guide. We stopped a lot for her to point out interesting buildings and little known facts and took us to places off the beaten track, including the most famous restaurant in Paris, where you have to book up to 6 months in advance and a set meal costs £300 without wine! (This was the restaurant that the movie Ratatouille was based on).

Gardens of the apartment where Victor Hugo lived

We stopped at a nice bakery for lunch where we had (you guessed it!) more baguettes. The tour finished about 2pm, and we headed to our next destination the Arc du Trimophe. 

The Arc was built in 1806 to honour those who fought for France, particularly during the Napoleonic Wars. On the inside and the top of the arc there are all of the names of generals and wars fought and underneath is the tomb of the unknown soldier from World War I. The roundabout that encircles the Arc is bizarre, there are no lanes and there seems to be no order as to where the cars are going, luckily people can access it by an underground subway.We bought tickets to head to the top of the arch to see another view of Paris, the best part of this was seeing the massive roads that stretch out in dead straight lines for miles and a view of the Eiffel Tower.

Saturday nights dinner was done in true Parisian style, we bought a rotisserie chicken from a local butcher, fresh bread from the baker and wine and cheese from the deli and had ourselves an amazing picnic on the banks of the river in front of the Notre Dame. The lights on the Notre Dame at night were outstanding, and we felt very ‘local’.

For desert we went to the Île de la Cité where we were told the best ice cream in Paris was sold, and they were not lying.

To cap off a very romantic night, we added our own padlock to the famous Pont de l'Archevêché bridge. The story goes that couples lock a padlock onto the bridge and throw the key into the Seine to signify that their love will never be broken. We were feeling really happy with ourselves until we realised that all the other couples had bought massive locks and had engraved them with their names and dates etc, and we bought the smallest cheapest one we could find. Oh well, the thought was there.

Our little lock!

Highlight: The picnic by the river, the roast chicken was to die for. 

Lowlight: Trying to find public toilets in Paris is a mission in itself. 

Interesting fact #1: When popular French King Henry IV was assassinated by François Ravaillac in 1610, Francois was pulled apart by four horses and before this he was scalded with burning sulphur, molten lead and boiling oil and resin, his flesh then being torn by pincers. Following his execution, Ravaillac's parents were forced into exile and the rest of his family was ordered never to use the name "Ravaillac" again, and the name is still banned in France today – now that’s a vendetta. 

Interesting fact #2: There is a guerilla artist around Paris who puts up images of Space Invaders around the city, and no one knows who he is, supposedly if you join up all the Space Invaders locations on a map, it would make a big Space Invader. 

Example of the Space Invaders