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Wednesday, July 12, 2023

Day 7 in England: Back and Forth by Boat to Greenwich

The teenager woke up fever-free and without a sore throat on this morning, but we decided to have her kick back and hang around the AirBnb for the day just in case. So it was just three intrepid adventurers who attempted to figure out how to get ourselves back and forth to Greenwich by boat. It went... not well.

Here's our day's agenda:

  • Thames Clipper to Greenwich
  • Royal Observatory
  • Greenwich Market
  • National Maritime Museum
  • Greenwich Foot Tunnel
  • Thames Clipper to Battersea Park
In theory, the Thames Clipper Uber Boat is the coolest idea ever. You buy a ticket, hop on the boat, and travel the Thames to your destination. I. Was. STOKED!!!

In actuality, the routes are completely incomprehensible to ascertain, the boats are mostly unlabeled so you can't tell if you're getting on the correct one without asking, and even when we asked, the employees couldn't seem to actually tell us how to actually get on the correct boat for the correct route. It was absolutely miserable. I could have literally walked to and from Greenwich in the time it took us to get to and from Greenwich on this day. 

So what I thought you were supposed to do was check this route map to see what color route you're supposed to take--

--and then cross-reference it with the timetable to see when your boat will arrive:


We wanted to go from Battersea Power Station to Greenwich, so we wanted an RB1, but what I think we ended up getting on was an RB6? Because it dumped all of us off at the Canary Wharf stop and went back the way it came from. So then we had to figure out 1) what our Oyster cards had been charged for that trip, since we'd put money on them specifically for this, 2) if we had enough money on the Oyster cards to continue the trip with a second ticket, because there wasn't a place to top up Oyster cards at the pier, and 3) what freaking boat were we actually supposed to take to finish getting to Greenwich.

If only any, you know, EMPLOYEES had been around to offer assistance! 

We thought about bailing and just riding the Tube out to Greenwich, but damn it, I wanted my boat ride, so we turned to Plan B, generally known as Throw Money at the Problem. Matt got us new paper tickets from the ticket machine, which was a waste of money if our Oyster card tickets were still good, but the advantage was that they at least said which pier we were going to in case we got thrown off the boat early again, and we got back in line to wait for the next random boat that came by going in the proper direction. 

At least the trip was pretty (although--another disappointment--all the seats have a dirty window in between you and the pretty things)!



Fortunately, I don't think there was any way to screw up going east from Canary Wharf to Greenwich (stay tuned for the evening, when we'll screw up our westward trip!), so when we FINALLY got back on a freaking boat, that boat at least took us straight to freaking Greenwich.

From there, it's just a 15-minute walk straight uphill to the Royal Observatory!

There was a lot of stuff that I wanted to see here, but first, we had to see the Main Attraction:


It's the Prime Meridian!


Check me out encompassing ALL the hemispheres!


The rest of the day will consist solely of me finding Prime Meridian markers and insisting on having my photo taken with them.

I thought the historical meridian markers were also interesting. There were several!


Apparently, astronomers spent quite some time dithering about whether the meridian should be here, or perhaps over here five feet to the right, or maybe just scooted over another couple of feet right here. It's like moving a coffee table, only you have to remake all your plaques and inform the entire world that you changed your mind.

I hadn't come to see them, specifically, but I loved the exhibits that showed examples from the history of astronomy. Here are some children's lacing cards from the 1820s, with the lacing holes being the locations of the stars that make up the constellation:


This globe is really cool, too, because the constellations show up as shadows on the wall behind it:


There are also artifacts here from the interesting history of timekeeping and measurement of all kinds. Here's the Time Ball, which still falls exactly at 1:00 pm daily so that ships on the Thames, households across the river, and anyone who happens to be looking in the right direction at the right time can synchronize their clocks:


And yes (because I looked it up), the New Year's Eve ball drop in Times Square DOES trace its history back to this very ball.


The Royal Observatory is on a hill, so check it out--you really can see it from a LONG WAY! Probably not during the heyday of the Industrial Revolution and its coal smog, though...


Here's the original entrance, with all the standardized measurements on display for the general public to reference at any time. The clock is especially important, because it reflected the real, actual time from the official timekeeper inside the observatory (there's a replica in the gift shop that I SUPER wanted, but even before I realized that my entire carry-on was going to be full of rocks, I knew I wasn't going to have room in it for a giant analogue clock...):


Oh, look! I found another Prime Meridian marker!


Once upon a time, Matt and I both read and were, for a pretty hot minute, obsessed with Longitude. So when we came upon an entire gallery devoted to chronicling the development of the ability to calculate longitude on ocean voyages, we both went SQUEEEEEE!!!!!

This below work was a star catalogue meant to define positions and orbits so exactly that ships could use it to calculate longitude... if only their ships were sitting on a perfectly flat ocean during a perfectly clear night, of course. It's got a super dishy backstory, though! John Flamsteed, the first Astronomer Royal, spent literal decades on his observations, and flat-out refused to publish them until he'd spent further decades refining and correcting. So Isaac Newton and Edmund Halley--as in, THE Isaac Newton and THE Edmund Halley--sneaked into his workplace, stole his documents, and published a pirated version. So then Flamsteed went around and picked up all the pirated copies he could find and destroyed them. This edition is the official one, published posthumously because that was the only way he'd stop messing with it:


Here's one of the timepieces made on the path to an accurate calculation of longitude. It's got dueling pendulums to hopefully counteract ship movement, and a variety of metals to hopefully counteract temperature changes:


It didn't work great.

Here's the real winner!


This watch keeps perfectly accurate time no matter how much it moves, what the temperature is, what the humidity is, or how much salt gets on it. Combine that with an accurate astronomical chart, and you'll never be lost again!

This exhibit below inspired me and Matt to explain to our college kid all about the good old days, when could call Time and Temperature on your landline. 


The teenager thought that this was absurd, and that calling to hear the movie listings and to request songs on the radio sounded equally absurd. But now we know why BBC Radio kept beeping at us every hour!

Found another Prime Meridian marker!


Even though Borough Market had been so crowded we all thought we were going to die it had also been really cool, so after watching the 1:00 Time Ball drop we left the Royal Observatory and walked over to check out Greenwich Market:


I swear to god I could take these two to the pits of hell and they would manage to find a churro stand:


I think the teenager who we'd left at the AirBnb would have liked Greenwich Market a lot, but just between us I'd rather have stayed at the museum and looked at stuff. 

After lunch, we walked over to the National Maritime Museum, where I had several things I wanted to see.

But first, the toddler playground!

They're deliberately ignoring the sign that says that only small children should ride the boats, and I'm pretending I don't know them.

There were so many exhibits that I wanted to see that we ended up just wandering, directionless, through the galleries. Fortunately, we happened upon all of my must-see sites!

This double hull outrigger canoe reminded me of Moana.

It's a real Marshall Islands stick chart!!! We learned about these at the very beginning of my kid's AP Human Geography study, so it was fun to see one in person.

The Atlantic Worlds gallery had an exhibit on Africa that felt kind of sketchy:


I mean, I guess they're not factually incorrect, but it feels very... dispassionate, I guess? Maybe that's my perspective as an American, where we're literally still having to tell people that Black lives literally matter, but I feel like the lede of this intro should have been something like "Enslaving people and trafficking them across the Atlantic, raping, torturing, and murdering them along the way and at their destinations, was all very bad, and we shouldn't have done that."

The exhibit did have a lot of artifacts from the history of African enslavement that I'd never seen before, but they also felt dispassionately presented and I didn't feel comfortable taking pictures. Like, this label shows the most emotion, and even it sounds like they're describing something from another planet:


I did send my teenager this pic of a guillotine used to execute 50+ royalists on a West Indian island, though, because eat the rich:


My obsessive reading of the Aubrey/Maturin novels have given me a taste for the Napoleonic War-era Royal Navy, so I was very stoked when our wanderings finally led us to the gallery I was most excited to see: Nelson, Navy, Nation! I outlasted even my poor college student in this gallery, as not only did I have to look at every single artifact and read its label twice, but then I had to go back and see my favorites a third time, then find something else I hadn't looked at closely enough, and then take another set of photos in case my first three sets hadn't turned out correctly:


Should I get desperately into model shipbuilding? I kind of think I should!


This is the first letter Nelson wrote with his left hand after having his right arm amputated:


Sooo... I know it's a kind of running joke in the Aubrey/Maturin novels, but I did not realize how very, very, very much everyone in England reveres Lord Nelson? They are REALLY into him! It made me realize that I am missing a lot of context for the novels, and a lot of references and imagery is likely passing right over my head. Like, now I think O'Brien is purposefully putting in similarities between Aubrey and Nelson, right?

Anyway, here's the coat Nelson was wearing when he was fatally wounded. You can see the bullet hole there at his left shoulder:


And here are the underthings he was wearing when he died. All that blood on his stockings belongs to a shipmate, though--he just fell in it:


In the same gallery, here's an unrelated photo of sailors shooting walruses. It was so fun to be in the Navy!


I'm sorry to say that I DID have to be dragged out of that gallery at closing time...

I'd sort of wanted to tour the Cutty Sark, but the ridiculous amount of time it took us to make our way all of the six miles to Greenwich that morning meant that I couldn't work it in, alas. Here it is from the outside, at least!


We were pretty footsore by this time, and we probably could have headed back to my kid and my AirBnb, but I'd seen this place on Tiktok--


--and I could not sleep easy at night until we'd experienced it for ourselves.

So we did!



On the other side of the tunnel, you get a lovely view back to where you came from:


Look VERY closely and you can even see the red ball at the Royal Observatory!

By the time we'd walked back through the tunnel we were EXHAUSTED, which was just the awesomest time to figure out how to get back on my new personal very least favorite mode of transportation ever, the fucking Thames Clipper Uber Boat OMG. If I'd had a brain cell left in my head I would have found a Tube station instead.

Determined that this time we were NOT going to fuck this up, Matt found an actual human to buy our return tickets from, and this human told us which boat to get on. So we got in line for that boat. And then that boat reached capacity, so we all had to walk back up the gangway and get in another line for the next boat... which was not set to arrive for forty freaking minutes. We should have tried to return our boat tickets and found the Tube station. But instead we waited in line, and when an employee came by Matt showed her our tickets, asked her if the next boat was the correct boat for our tickets, and she said it was.

So finally, FINALLY the next boat comes and we all get on it. We get to about here--


--and then the boat stops at Canary FUCKING Wharf AGAIN, dumps us all out AGAIN, and turns around AGAIN, because it was not the right boat.

So, y'all, I feel like a few times on this trip, some random employee deliberately gave us the wrong information, and I feel like they did this because they did not want to have to tell us bad news. Is this a British thing, or an us thing?

At least there were a ton of tourists on this boat, and we were all irritated and tired and confused, so I wasn't the only one not happy when we all got dumped off. There were a LOT of people griping, but the guy emptying the boat kept saying, "The next boat will be here in just a few minutes! Just wait for the next boat; it will be here in a few minutes!"

By "few", he meant forty.

When the next boat finally came, the guy letting us on was bemusedly very patient with me when I stopped the entire line to be all, "Does this boat go to Battersea? This very boat? I'm on the boat that will take me to Battersea?"

And hallelujah, it did!

Fine, it was worth it to be able to go UNDER the Tower Bridge, even if my view of it was through a dirty window.


...and then after all that, and then walking to our bus stop, to get the bus that would let us out a block from our AirBnb, the bus never came. It kept saying it was coming on Google Maps, then it would say it was delayed, then that bus would disappear and Google Maps would start saying the next bus would be here in five minutes, then it would say it was delayed, and so on and so on. We played that out for about 30 minutes before I was finally like, "OMG guys I think we're going to have to walk."

Well, we HAD been living just a few blocks from Battersea Park all week without having stepped into it once, so a mile walk straight through the middle was a least a good chance to take it all in...

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Saturday, July 1, 2023

Day 5 in England: The Natural History Museum and the Victoria and Albert Museum

Overall, my teenager was fairly patient with being hauled along on Mom's England Trip of a Lifetime, but this kid who used to be my best traveler now insists that she hates all travel with the fire of a thousand suns... and she hates visiting museums with the fire of almost a thousand suns.

Funnily enough, the kid who used to be the worst traveler... just, OMG the WORST TRAVELER!... is now the best traveler ever, and by that I mean that she loves all the same travel things that I do: museums, tours of old shit, a few more museums, grubbing in the mud to find literal trash, eating local junk food, and for a nightcap, we'll hit up one more museum then go to bed early so that on the next day we can be at our first museum right when it opens.

So although I was sad to leave my teenager home on this day of museums, she was ecstatic to have the choice to opt out and spend the whole day just rattling around the AirBnb by herself.

And my college student and I, Matt in tow, were ecstatic to catch the bus around the corner and take it all the way to the front door of the Natural History Museum.

We were there right when it opened!

I was the most excited to see the Fossil Marine Reptiles Hall, which is where Mary Anning lives, but in the interest of crowd control, we first hit up the gallery I was second most excited to see:

DINOSAURS!!!

This was not my favorite dinosaur exhibit--for some reason, many of the fossils were mounted overhead, in dim light--

--and I had a lot of trouble simply making them out, much less peering closely and nearsightedly at all their tiny details, as I prefer. 

Still, there were some wonderful treasures! Here is part of the first (known) T-Rex fossil ever discovered:

We also saw the first known Iguanodon fossils ever discovered, two teeth found by Mary Ann Mantell. Later, a quarry owner discovered part of an Iguanodon skeleton inside a limestone slab that had been blasted apart. These Iguanodon teeth are another example of men intercepting women's finds and claiming them as their own, as it's Mary Ann's husband, Gideon, who gets most of the credit for the Iguanodon. To be fair, he was the one who researched it and described it, but he's also the one who had the education and the freedom of movement to do so.

I'm interested in the history of paleontology, and I like to look at exhibits that are still set up to look like they might have in the 1800s and early 1900s. It was really fun, then, that both the British Museum and the Natural History Museum had exhibits like this!

I like to look at the labels on older fossils to see if anyone interesting collected them. A couple of these fossils are labeled as coming from the Mantell collection, as in Gideon Mantell, and a couple more are labeled as having been collected by W.E. Cutler. There's not a ton of information about him, but a couple of cool points: he died of malaria in 1925 while on a dinosaur dig in Africa, and he has a mystery! In 1920, Cutler uncovered a partial Chasmosaurus skeleton and put it in storage to await a buyer. In 1921, he was hired to dig in Africa, where he died. He left no records saying what he did with his Chasmosaurus or where it is. There *is* a Chasmosaurus fossil in the Natural History Museum that resembles the field photographs of Cutler's fossil, but it doesn't have any associated records. 

I would happily spend the rest of my life in some museum's endless archives, puttering away and solving little mysteries like this one.

There were several good specimens from the collection of Georges Cuvier, who I used to be into until I learned about his WHOLE THING with "scientific" racism. He "dissected" the enslaved human trafficking victim Sarah Baartman after her death, not to figure out why she died but to get some primary source support for his racist beliefs, part of which included the idea that Adam and Eve were white. He was super gross, and I'm not happy to have to add him to my list of Misogynistic Men of Science. 

After the dinosaurs, since we were in the area and all, we looked at every mammal, every invertebrate, and every fish, reptile, and amphibian:

Then... Mary Anning!!!

Mary Anning's first articulated plesiosaur fossil!!!

I do not understand the Natural History Museum's obsession with displaying artifacts up high, but a large number of my precious plesiosaurs and ichthyosaurs were mounted easily 15 feet up. I can't read the labels from that high! I can't closely inspect every bone!

Seriously, look at this nonsense!

Still, even though you have to crane your neck, there were so many beautiful fossils. Look at Mary Anning's marvelous ichthyosaurs!

I love how they're still in their original mounts, in their cases that call them Sea-Dragons!


Only the bottom fossil has a known provenance from Mary Anning, but she probably found the other two, as well. 

Two interesting things about the below inscription: 1) he uses the phrased "purchased from Mary Anning," which is a great way to not admit that she also discovered and prepared the fossil, and 2) he says that she found another part of this fossil later and sent it to him, which shows how well she remembered all of her discoveries, enough to connect one piece to another years apart, and that she was too generous for her own good. She ought to have charged him through the fucking nose for that piece.


This is Mary Anning's biggest ichthyosaur. Matt couldn't even get the whole thing in the same frame as me!


It's so big that it has other fossils ON it!


We could have easily stayed at the Natural History Museum until it closed, and we did swing by most of the other galleries, but on this day I also really wanted to check out the Victoria and Albert Museum, conveniently located just across the street. There was nothing in particular that I'd been excited about seeing there, but of course I DID find marvelous things!

See the pipe found on the Thames foreshore?!? SQUEE!!!


Thanks to all the Medieval art I studied in my misguided twenties, I got very distracted by all the lovely rood screens--

Awww, look at that beautiful sculpture of a bunch of men torturing a lone woman!

--and effigies--


--and dragons!




I really loved the large-scale architectural elements in the Victoria and Albert. The museum has saved pieces like staircases, entire balconies, and decorated columns-and you can look at them!


There was also a wonderful display of jewelry, so the college student and I spent a LOT of time inching our way around the jewelry exhibit, peering at every tiny ring and reading its label twice, then peering at it again with renewed interest based on what we'd learned from the label. I'm low-key obsessed with iron jewelry now--it was great to wear during mourning and during wartimes after you'd donated your precious metal jewelry, but it's also super bad-ass and I would wear it all the freaking time if I had it.

Also bad-ass? Queen Victoria's sapphire and diamond coronet!


It was designed by Prince Albert, who apparently had excellent taste and was in charge of making sure all of Victoria's jewelry was beautiful and classy.

I don't wear jewelry, but I could use someone with excellent taste to make sure that all of my cargo pants and T-shirts and sneakers are beautiful and classy!

Here's our trip so far!
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