Dan Chan: vacation

Greenwich is famous for its standard time (GMT) that bisects the world into eastern and western hemispheres at 0 degrees longitude, and also known as the prime meridian (the international dateline is its analog on the otherside, but that zig zags around certain islands). Anyways, Greenwich was a great 20 minute boat detour down the Thames. Picking up a high speed ferry from the Tower of London we headed to this smaller city and its observatory in the park and university that is central to the town. As dusk set, you are able to visualize the prime meridian as a powerful green laser beams its path above the point that I'm bouncing around and over in the picture here. You can see our Greenwich pictures in Europe Gallery allery 6, starting from our ferry ride. It's not everyday that you have a picture that spans two hemispheres, let along having the opportunity of bouncing back and forth between them.

And we might also have seen some underpants (or lack thereof) in one of these galleries documenting our dinner excursion through the Montmarte district of Paris. Rest assured the facade of these buildings including the historic Moulin Rouge was as far as we got as we settled for a nice little Italian bistro over the cabaret that evening. In a whirlwind 8 day trip, our journey spanned over 11,000 miles with over 60 hours of travel and as we straddled Greenwich--even crossing over two hemispheres. I brought along the Canon XSi to break in - so pardon some duplicate series of pictures as I was trying to play with the settings and didn't prune these 3000+ (40GB+) worth of photos yet, everything here was taken as is, minus the videos, and scaled down to smaller size. Just as a reference itinerary, this is what David and I covered in the 8 days that we were gone on our version of The Amazing Race:

Sunday November 16, 2008: Travel 350 miles by car from Rochester, MN to Chicago O'Hare, hop on a connector flight to Dulles, Washington D.C., enjoy a three hour layover, jump aboard another plane for an 8-hour flight to London Heathrow, figure out how to use the London Underground system and buy an Oyster card, jump on Monday morning's 7am commute to St. Pancras station.
Monday November 17, 2008: Realizing that we arrived too early for our 1 pm Eurostar train to Paris, we meandered the British Library near St. Pancras, enjoying the Magna Carta and various original texts such as Leonardo Da Vinci's notes, Isaac Newton's letters, and Galileo's sketches. The Eurostar was a lost memory due to sleep deprivation, but after pit-stopping in Paris, we walked the Champ de Mars, and ascended the Eiffel Tower
Tuesday November 18, 2008: Visited the Palace of Versailles, the Hospital Museum (Musée de l'Assistance publique - Hôpitaux de Paris) and walked by Notre Dame Cathedral by night. Ascended the Arc de Triomphe, and ended up in Montmarte for dinner and shopping.
Wednesday November 19, 2008: Revisted and ascended Notre Dame Cathedral (Notre Dame de Paris) proper, saw the museum and crypts of Notre Dame, walked through Hotel Dieu and then saw 2-million skeletons in the Catacombs of Paris. We finished the day blitzing through the Orsay Museum, blistering our feet through the Louvre and finished the day at Place Monge, which ironically enough was not happening at all at 10:30 pm at night, though we managed to sup on escargot outdoors at a cafe that spoke not a speck of English.
Thursday November 20, 2008: 5 am Eurostar trip back to London was equally not the most exciting though we arrived plenty early in London to beat the opening of most places at 10 am. We hit up the British Museum, ate out of the supermarkets where food was actually affordable, and visited the Hunterian Museum of John Hunter (1728–1793) as we came in part to study history of medicine by also reading the biography of John Hunter: The Knife Man. We went by Westminster and Parliament but by 3 pm apparently the sun sets in London so we decided to go crash and recoup from sleep deprivation early.
Friday November 21, 2008: London Bridge (Tower Bridge), and the Tower of London started off our day, and effectively ended the daylight too since there was only about five hour's worth. We took a boat to Greenwich and straddled the Prime Meridian with a foot in each hemisphere. A walk through Leicester Square and Trafalgar Square ended our evening.
Saturday November 22, 2008: More walking. More blisters and bursitis. Buckingham Palace probably had a changing of the guard, but we were too pooped to wait and find out, so we walked onwards and across the Thames from Parliament and Big Ben and Westmister Abbey, in fact we walked all the way to the Imperial War Museum where we stayed longer than we expected, and ended up skipping St. Paul's Cathedral, though we walked in and looked around without paying its hefty entrance fee. Finishing the night in Oxford Circus we supped on fish and chips in an English Pub, and nearly died on the late-night tube back to London Heathrow Airport (but that's a story you'll have to ask either David or me)
Sunday November 23, 2008: After a night slouched in the Heathrow airport, reverse Sunday November 16, 2008th itinerary from Heathrow, add 1 hour of lost luggage in Chicago, and we've made it back home from our week of too much fun which was catalyzed by the two of us discovering $48 round trip tickets to London from Chicago.

So in the end David and I left our families behind for a week, squandered their wealth, studied some history of medicine, had a great time, came home bearing gifts, and now our trip is yours to enjoy vicariously in these many galleries! (Click the links below to enter each respective gallery which are arranged by 500 images each in chronological order)