The newest Royal Borough

Continuing our resolution of discovering new parts of London, we finally made it to Greenwich a couple of weeks ago. We had been wanting to visit for ages, but kept deciding only to go if the day was sunny, which made it hard due to London's mostly grey days.

So we just decided to go, even if it rained, but luckily the weather turned out to be lovely, and since it wasn't yet Spring or Summer, the crowds weren't too crazy.

Greenwich has recently become a Royal Borough as part of the Queens Diamond Jubilee celebrations this year. It joins the three existing boroughs of Westminster, Kensington and Chelsea and Maidenhead. Greenwich will also be hosting some of the Olympic events, I think the Equestrian events for both the Olympics and Paralympics will be held there, as well as some shooting and archery. So nothing interesting, like gymnastics, which is by far the best Olympic sport.

Greenwich is most famous for being the 'Home of Time', or the Global Time standard on which every time zone is based. Other than being in a 00 time zone, it's a lovely little village, with a great farmers market.

Greenwich is over an hour from our house, in South East London. To get there we had to take the District Underground Line to the city, and then change onto the driver-less DLR train. The DLR is great, there is no driver, and if you manage to score a seat up the front, it feels like a roller-coaster and you can pretend you're driving. It's definitely worth pushing the kids out of the way to get the good seats!

The view from the front of the DLR

Our first stop was the Greenwich Market, this is a great little market that has lots of different food and clothing stalls.  We grabbed some Paella for lunch and ate it outside while listening to a great Irish folk band outside one of the local pubs, it's always great getting free entertainment while you're eating! But we made sure to leave some money since they were so good.

We then had a browse round some of the clothing stalls, and I bought a cool handmade singlet with a bow sewn on the front. I've worn it almost every weekend since I bought it, so it was a good buy!

After lunch we headed over to the Greenwich park to walk off the Paella, and to have a look at the Observatory. The Planetarium was closed, so we decided not to bother going inside the Observatory, and instead just wandered around the outside and took in the amazing view over London city.

We spent a while wandering through the park, and watching the hundreds of people out walking their dogs. The park is absolutely huge, so it took a good couple of hours to wander round it all.

We were walking through the flower gardens and came across an inquisitive squirrel. We felt bad we hadn't brought any nuts with us since it came so close and I would have been able to hand feed it! Perhaps we should just start carrying around bags of peanuts whenever we go out, just in case.

Since we didn't visit the Observatory, we decided to go and see the National Maritime Museum instead. The great thing about London, is pretty much all of their museums are free, so it's nice to kill a few hours wandering around inside even if you're not that interested in the Museum itself!

The Maritime Museum was pretty interesting, we had a pastry in their upstairs cafe, read all about Captain Cook and admired the various Maritime based exhibits.

The light from a lighthouse

A scary looking figurehead

It's New Zealand!

Apparently the huge walk through the park had not exhausted us enough, so we decided to walk underneath the Thames to Canary Wharf and have a look at some of the huge skyscrapers they have there.

It was pretty cool walking underneath the river, but it was so loud with the boats passing overhead. It really felt like it was about to cave in any second.

Canary Wharf is packed during the week, full of office workers. But it was completely dead in the weekend. There are huge buildings surrounded by lots of canals, with lots of cafe's and restaurants beside the water. It's completely different to the rest of London, most of the buildings are brand new, where as the rest of London is thousands of years old! It reminded me more of Auckland, being completely surrounded by water.

After that we jumped back on the DLR (once again in the front seat) and headed home. One more place we can now tick off our list!