Greenwich

This Saturday, I took the train to London to visit my friend and fellow IR student Yang. When discussing where we might go, she suggested choosing one of two places: Greenwich or Hampstead. It was an easy choice to make. Back in March, a visiting friend introduced me to an app that has information about all the UNESCO world heritage sites and lets the user track how many sites they have been to. Since then, I have used this app to an ungodly extent, letting it dictate many of my preferences for my upcoming US road trip. Anyway, suffice it to say, Greenwich is on the UNESCO list and Hampstead is not.

We left from Westminster Pier at 9:38, taking the ferry all the way to Greenwich Pier. It was my first time taking the ferry in London and though it was somewhat expensive, I would recommend the experience. It is not often that in this chronically underfunded and recklessly privatised infrastructural hellscape, a tourist can feel as though they are in Hong Kong.

The weather was beautiful, and conscious that it may not last, we started our excursion by walking through the grounds of the Old Royal Naval College, making our way south past the Queen’s House and the National Maritime Museum to Greenwich Park. The significance of Greenwich Park is that it houses the Royal Observatory, the origin of the Prime Meridian. I vaguely remember reading Joseph Conrad’s novel The Secret Agent, in which one of the main characters is tasked with destroying the building. As I probably learned in college but have re-learned while doing the research for writing this post, this plot was based on a real event. The anarchist Martial Bourdin got torn to pieces when – apparently on his way to the observatory – his bomb went off prematurely. What I also found out was that the Unabomber Ted Kaczynski was a great fan of the novel.

Nowadays, the observatory excites weaker passions. Far from being a symbol of modernity and a magnet for anarchist terrorism, it is a reminder, as Yang pointed out, of the height Britain has fallen from since its glory days. On that note, we went down the hill again and hunted ourselves a nice meal at the Greenwich Market. I was feeling adventurous and, rather than giving to my almost primeval impulse of gobbling down a pastel de nata, bought a Jesuita at the Portuguese pastry shop. I am glad to report I was not disappointed, and indeed, I will have difficulties choosing between the two in the future.

Having visited the Queen’s House gallery and explored a little more of the surroundings, we found that there was not much else to see and decided to travel back. We took the train to London Bridge Station, took a look at Southwark Cathedral, got politely told off for trying to walk down one of the aisles during service, and promptly left the cathedral again. Our last tourist stop that day was Tate Modern. Yang is convinced that the world can be split into “Berlin people and Vienna people,” her being very much a Berlin person and me a Vienna type. Tate Modern is definitely a place for the former group, and I will probably be forever haunted by the bizarre concept of memorised improvisation. However, I got into the swing of things by the time we finished with some of the more recent expositions and got to the surrealists, who were more intelligible and hence, more meme-able.

That evening, we had dinner at Zima, a modern Russian restaurant whose owner is running fundraisers for Ukrainian refugees. Both Yang and I were really looking forward to the cherry vareniki, which resulted in us making a joint meal of several appetisers but ordering our desserts separately. I was about to comment that this was a funny reversal of how joint meals usually work, but actually, there is nothing funny about maximising one’s enjoyment of what is surely the best part of any meal.