Thames Day 3: Greenwich to Greenwich Pensiula...

The biggest “city” along the way was Greenwich, which is still technically part of London. There’s a lot of history there, including the 15th century Palace of Placentia (now the Old Royal Naval College) where both King Henry VIII and Queen Elizabeth I were born. This is the Cutty Sark, a British clipper ship built in 1869 for its speed to be used in the tea trade, which is preserved in a dry dock as a tourist attraction.

Unfortunately, we were too rushed to walk through the Greenwich Foot Tunnel, which opened in 1902 and sits 50 feet (15 meters) below the Thames. It is used by northbound walkers on the Thames Path to join the southbound path for the remaining leg of the journey.

We could see the O2, the immense entertainment center built for the millennium, in the distance which we would eventually walk around as the river nearly makes a u-turn.

The sky had turned rather gray by the afternoon.

The Prime Meridian of the world, from which all longitude is measured, passes through the Royal Observatory in Greenwich. It also passes through the O2 culminating in this metal strip at the Thames, depicting where we crossed from the Western Hemisphere into the Eastern Hemisphere.

Mermaid, by British artist Damien Hirst who once lived along the Greenwich Penisula, is surrounded by a blue-ringed octopus, one of the most poisonous animals in the sea. It was interesting to walk along the massive residential blocks that we had seen from the Emirates Airlines Cable Car six months earlier...

...and to see the cable cars from below. This sculpture is Quantum Cloud by Antony Gormley in 1999. It’s 98 feet (30 meters) high featuring a human figure, based on the artist, surrounded by a seemingly chaotic cloud that vibrates with energy. It was built from 3,600 5-foot (1.5-meter) long hollow square sections of galvanized steel.

At The Jetty, a community garden and café, is another sculpture by Damien Hirst: Hydra and Kali, depicting a battle between the sexes, with swords against serpents, as well as the ravages of time.