Greenwich, meantime

(Right: the place where time begins)
Today I left my hotel in Earl's Court with an invitation to visit an old mate from Master Practitioner training, Rabiyah Patel. Rabi and her husband Nigel, her brother Farid, and her adorable baby son Nour, live in a lovely apartment in Greeenwich, overlooking the Thames, just west of the Cutty Sark, a 141-year-old clipper ship - the last-built merchant sailing vessel, the only remaining tea-clipper - that some arsehole tried and failed to burn three years ago.

My feet being the kind of ruined they've been since I had to give up my orthotics, I nearly contacted Rabi on any number of occasions in the past week to turn down the honor of her invitation, especially once I scoped out the distance between the nearest Docklands Light Rail station and her apartment. Doubling that distance for a round trip, and adding the trek through Bank station to the DLR tracks seemed like asking for trouble.

But one doesn't have adventures by avoiding trouble, even supposing it could be done. So after braving The Horror That Is The Breakfast Room, I walked the very few yards between my hotel and the Earl's Court tube, and headed east.

The world standard of maps and driving / transport / walking directions is the Google map, but when Google goes head-to-head with London, put your money on London. I had not yet arrived at this useful conclusion when, armed with my walking directions from you-know-who, I set out from Cutty Sark DLR station, already a bit late for the lunch Rabi's mum was making for me: homemade Dal and Basmati Rice.

Londinium is about 2000 years old, having been built by Caesar's lads, who laid out streets much as they are in Rome, along cartpaths, footpaths, and cowpaths. The way in which streets begin and end, rename themselves seemingly at random, and fade into nonexistence in the middle of council housing estates is either quaint and charming, or diabolically perverse, depending on how much your feet hurt. Outfoxed by London's streets, I wandered around Deptford for 45 minutes, aided by three sets of conflicting directions from locals, before asking a west African man near Deptford Green. He was new to the neighborhood, so he reached into the back seat of his car and pulled out his A-Z.

The "A-to-Zed" is the London standard of maps and directions. Every one of those deliberately perverse little bovine trails is represented somewhere in its pages. We found the street, and he offered to drive me there, as it was a miserably hot and humid day in Caesar's little riverside town. When we had no luck finding a way in to Rabiyah's street, we asked a passerby, who sent us 180 degrees from our destination. As I began noticing streets I'd walked down forty minutes before, I alerted my benefactor, who turned the car around, then noticed that the end of the street was right in front of us, nowhere near the location indicated by either the A-Z or Google. He dropped me off, and I walked around for another 20 minutes looking for the right building.

So in the end I got my Dal, and some water, and then Rabiyah and I walked to Greenwich Park, and up the hill to the Royal Observatory, where time on this planet begins and ends, then down through the park to the Old Royal Naval College--one of the architectural marvels of 17th-century Britain. Then we turned past the Cutty Sark (still undergoing restoration), and back to the DLR station.

My feet still haven't forgiven me, but the rest of me is glad I opted for a bit of adventure on my last day in town.