A Day in Greenwich: the Fan Museum, Afternoon Tea & the Prime Meridian

The study abroad office here at Queen Mary planned a cheap trip for anyone interested to sit down for afternoon tea at the Orangery in Greenwich, attached to the very unique and peculiar fan museum.

Greenwich is an adorable and bustling neighborhood of London that is accessible by the DLR, a monorail that runs mostly overground.

Before we sat down for tea, a sweet older English woman gave us a tour of her award winning fan museum. What is a fan museum, you may ask? It is a museum entirely dedicated to fans, some dating back over one thousand years.

The museum is only 2 rooms large, but they have over 4,000 fans in storage.

Most fans were not for practical use, but rather just fashion statements. The one you see above has a real stuffed hummingbird as a decoration on it. It's not really my taste, but I guess it was fashionable at one point in time.

This fan above was painted by Salvador Dalí. 

After our tour of this unusual museum, we finally sat down for a spot of authentic British tea.

Thick scones with fresh strawberry jam topped with clotted cream, followed by an overly decadent slab of fudgy chocolate cake--and endless tea, of course.

I felt ready to roll on home back to Mile End after that, but we still had one more leg to our journey. We quickly made our way through a park and up the hill to the Royal Observatory to catch a glimpse of London right as the sun was setting.

The Royal Observatory is also home to the Prime Meridian of the world, the point at which is considered 0 degrees longitude. 

Basically, I'm standing in both the Western and Eastern hemisphere at once! 

After that exhausting journey stuffing our faces with cake and traveling across hemispheres, it was time to go back home for the night--explorers need their rest too.