Chad and Catherine's Adventures in London

His Royal Highness (HRH)

Yes, we finally got the photos to prove that Chad indeed attended a dinner reception with His Royal Highness Prince Charles at Clarence House, the Prince's official residence  (shared with Princes William and Harry) on May  4th, 2010.  

HRH hosted the event to celebrate the 90th Anniversary of the College of Real Estate Management. Prince Charles is the Patron of the college and Chad's company the UK-GBC partnered with the college to deliver a new course called an Introduction to Sustainability in the Built Environment (a course about the social, environmental and economic benefits of green buildings and homes). The UK-GBC is helping the college integrate sustainable building principles into their curriculum.

I asked Chad to be a guest writer on the blog to share his experience first hand:

The Prince is an devoted environmentalist and is a champion of green buildings.  Luckily, there were only fifty attendees at the dinner, therefore I actually got some time to actually speak with Prince (more than just an introduction and handshake although I didn't wash my hand for over twenty four hours!).  The future king of England certainly has a strong presence and I will admit it wasn't easy at first talking to him ( I forgot for a moment that he puts his trousers on in the morning just like the rest of common folk). 

I was prepped by the Master of the Household, Wing Commander Richard how to initially greet "Your Royal Highness" and don't extend your hand to him until he offers his hand to you. After a less than perfect greeting and overcoming some anxiety, I quickly found that Charles was very easy to talk to.  We spoke primarily about industry topics - sustainability, new technologies, combined heat and power (CHP).  He was serious but with certainly with a good sense of humor. I had seen him once before in a much larger audience but meeting him in person, the Prince much shorter and older than I expected.   

Overall, I felt extremely honored and privileged to meet the next King of England.  I would never have guessed that a boy from Mayberry, North Carolina would one day be having a cocktail and conversing with royalty in London, England!

Greenwich, England

The weather this past weekend was amazing. Simply amazing.  On Sunday morning, we decided to take  a day trip to Greenwich which is just to the southeast of the City of London, right on the Thames River. Surprisingly, it only took us about 45 minutes on the tube to arrive right in the heart of this beautiful and historic waterfront town.

Greenwich is packed full of history.  It is best known for two things: (1) it's significant naval history and (2) the birthplace of Greenwich Mean Time which we all know as "GMT".  Much of the House of Tudor originates from Greenwich (see plaque below) and it was awe inspiring to stand at the "Royal Steps" where Royalty from hundreds of years back would have stepped off their various elaborate boats from a trip from "the continent", Windsor castle or even the Tower of London.

The Royal Steps

 

House of Tudor:

 
 

Our full Greenwich photo album: http://picasaweb.google.com/lh/photo/TrIyVk2XiZVnP7qnqIlrKg?feat=directlink

From Greenwich

More info on Greenwich from wikipedia:

Greenwich Mean Time (GMT) is a term originally referring to mean solar time at the Royal Observatory in Greenwich. It is commonly used in practice to refer to Coordinated Universal Time(UTC) when this is viewed as a time zone, especially by bodies connected with the United Kingdom, such as the BBC World Service,^[20] the Royal Navy, the Met Officeand others, although strictly UTC is an atomic time scale which only approximates GMT with a tolerance of 0.9 second. It is also used to refer to Universal Time (UT), which is a standard astronomical concept used in many technical fields and is referred to by the phrase Zulu time.

As the United Kingdom grew into an advanced maritime nation, British mariners kept at least one chronometer on GMT in order to calculate their longitude from the Greenwich meridian, which was by convention considered to have longitude zero degrees (this convention was internationally adopted in the International Meridian Conference of 1884). Note that the synchronization of the chronometer on GMT did not affect shipboard time itself, which was still solar time. But this practice, combined with mariners from other nations drawing from Nevil Maskelyne's method of lunar distances based on observations at Greenwich, eventually led to GMT being used worldwide as a reference time independent of location. Most time zones were based upon this reference as a number of hours and half-hours "ahead of GMT" or "behind GMT".