I’ve mentioned a trip I made to Highgate Cemetery before. It was one of the Magnificent Seven, a group of privately run cemetery’s that ringed what was, at the time, London. They were set up because the inner London burial sites were filling up and the dead bodies in the middle of a dense city were causing health problems. The British of the 19th century loved their burials and business in these new cemetery’s was good. As the Victorian fascination with death gave way to more of an interest in things like cremation, they ran into trouble. First they cut back on landscaping and maintenance and eventually, they shut down. Today, I checked out Abney Park, which is one of the other shuttered cemetery. Unlike Highgate, this one was taken over by the local council (Hackney) relatively early, although they didn’t do anything with it to keep it from becoming overgrown. However, it has recently done quite a lot to turn it into public park space. So, unlike Highgate, you can easily just go in and take a stroll around and take in all the impressive sights to see. And, it’s only about a 20 minute walk from my flat. Here would be some highlights:

I think this gives a good impression of the state of things in this burial site. It’s been overrun by this lush greenery which makes it pretty cool looking and feels very relaxing, especially since it’s surrounded by the hustle and bustle of Stoke Newington.

There’s something about the way these graves have all lilted in various directions that I liked.

A unique part of this cemetery is the remains of this old church right in the middle of it. You might notice the supports holding it together as it’s in very bad shape. You’ll also notice the beautiful blue sky today (I was not even wearing a coat). 😛

This is the interior of the church. I love how, in the middle of London (this isn’t the very center of the city, but it’s still central London), you can have this wonderful piece of history and greenery and have buildings like this as a reminder of how old everything is around here. Hackney has done a great job of keeping this space a beautiful combination of history and park space while respecting the fact that’s thousands of people’s final resting place is right here.

For those of you with good memories, you might recall my triumphs last year in both lawn bowling and American bowling. Well, I was heading home one night and ended up catching my bus home in Finsbury Square, which has the lawn bowling pitch in the middle of it. The architecture around it is a mix of 1920s, 1950s and contemporary architecture. This building isn’t that exciting looking, but I do like the colors on it once the sun goes down:

Since it’s a winter lull in the interesting part of my life :), I’m shooting just to capture some of the fun little things in life. Hope you enjoy. And mom, if you’re nice, I might take some pictures of skinny Anna and fat Chewy.

The last couple of mornings have been extremely foggy. However, the fog has burned off and it’s become very lovely. As luck would have it, I thought about an interesting compare and contrast photo and whipped out my camera on my way to the bus stop yesterday morning. Let’s compare shall we:

Normal (slightly overcast and rainy) weather

Slightly foggy 🙂

I saw a picture in one of those horrible free dailys always floating around town where someone managed to get a photo from an airplane in which the entire city was socked in except the tall buildings in Canary Wharf. Pretty cool.

This is unfortunate. It looks like there was a nasty fire at one of the Camden Markets on Saturday night. I’ve written about one of my trips there before. The first picture is inside the section that caught fire, I believe. It’s a bit of a hipster area with a lot of funky shops that are fun to peruse. The part of the market affected is built into an aqueduct which creates a very cool environment. Here’s hoping the local shops are able to recover and rebuild after this. The details still seem to be spotty, so we’ll see what happened and to what extent the damage is soon.

Just to return o’ so briefly to the theme of Egypt, here are some cat mummies:

Now, I love my cats, but this is a bit extreme. I would never do this to Anna and Chewy no matter how much I like having them around. And, as it turns out, neither did the Egyptians. These are not mummies of beloved members of their households, but actually sacrifices. Again, each animal signified some trait that was good to have as a person passed into the afterlife. So, they’d round up a cat, break its neck and bury it with the person. They also had fish and eel mummies to the left of these fine felines. Poor animals.

With almost 300 stops and a penchant for having names that sound a little odd to American ears (Cheapside, Elephant and Castle, Wapping), you would think it would be hard to come up with the funniest tube station name (which would likely correspond to a name of an area). Well, let me tell you, it’s not even close. I’ll give you a hint:

(It ain’t Heathrow)

Not only in the stop in question snicker worthy (I’m not the only one. I swear!), but it’s the end of the line for the Picadilly line which means you get to hear it multiple times when going north/eastbound and you get signs like the one above just screaming it at you. 🙂

Someday soon, you’ll have a picture of me at that stop. And I’ll have to find a pub in the area.

After seeing the vast array of history and culture that the British Museum has to offer, it was time for a little something different. Look at the two images below and please write a 5000 word essay on the differences:

An Egyptian mummy in the museum

An “Egyptian” statue at Harrods surrounded by luxury goods 🙂

I go in circles to say Carolyn and my next stop on our little London tour day was Harrod’s which is one of those gigantic department stores. It’s very large and is very beautiful but it’s quite different from a museum. We were most curious about the food hall since neither of us is much of a shopper. It was impressive, but the numbers of people got a little overwhelming:

We decided to check out some of the less crowded parts of the store and take in the wide array of goods to be purchased.

If you thought I was done with the British Museum after my first trip, you are sorely mistaken. Carolyn and I decided to hit up a little culture while she was in town and, when I found out she had never been, we hopped a train to see some of the British Museum. Last time, I focused on the large monumental Egyptian pieces that had been ‘acquired’ from that part of the world. This time around, it was time for the funerary practices. That’d be mummies. Cool!

When you think of Egyptian burials, you think the iconic image of King Tut. However, when a civilization lasts in various forms for 4000 years, the trends differ, sometimes in small ways sometimes in large ways. For example, as Egypt lost it’s independence to the Romans, you suddenly start seeing the style of the portraits on the front of the coffins/sarcophagus’ take on a very Roman look. There’s one in the museum’s collection that is actually a frieze that looks like something found in Pompeii. There were also different types of wrapping. Depending on the person, the quality of what they were bured in could be quite different.

This was a very well-to-do citizen’s sarcophgus. These are the two inner-most parts of her burial. She was buried like one of those Russian dolls with layer upon layer of coffin.

Since the Egyptians belief in the after-life was that you ended up in a world not unlike the temporal world, they wanted to make sure you had everything you needed to live a good life. So they added things like food, coins and, in this picture above, beer to your tomb so you could enjoy a nice ale (right) while chilling out for eternity.

Since Carolyn had never been to the museum, we back-tracked to the monumental Egyptian section so she could see the large statues and the Rosette Stone. This allowed my to get a picture of the arm that used to be part of a very large statue:

It’s not 100 feet long, but it’s pretty big. 🙂

So my company in the US has had some cool locations for their holiday party’s the last few years. We dined next to a Tyrannosaurus Rex 2 years ago and last year, we ate with the fishes at the Aquarium. Now, the setup in the UK isn’t quite as large scale, but they managed to put on a nice party for us anyway. It was a little cramped, but I imagine it’s harder to find a space to fit 150 people for dinner. The best part, as I’ve mentioned, was that Carolyn flew into town. So, I got to introduce her to people who she’ll see quite a bit more of very soon. Alas, most of the photos I took look like shit, but here’s at least one picture of me and Carolyn:

Note my new suit! That was quite amusing. I’ve never been known to dress nicely at work and my coworkers, none of whom are known for wearing nice clothes either, were all shocked at how I managed to clean up 🙂

Anyway, tomorrow’s a little touristy fun in London, so I’ll be sure to have more pictures.

The New River isn’t a river at all but a man-made aqueduct built in the early 1600s to provide water to London as the city grew. Originally, it stretched almost 40 miles north of the city using gravity to bring the water down to London. Today, it officially terminates about a mile north of my flat, but it used to carry the water just west of my office. Now, the unused above-ground sections have been converted into a park and create a beautiful way to see some green in the city. As luck would have it, it’s the best way for me to get from my flat to the nearby farmer’s market. Since I like to walk along it often, I thought I get some photos of it while I went to pick up some meat and veg this fine Sunday morn.

A beautiful fall day along the New River. Since the river no long supplies water to anyone, many parts have got algae on it. But this section is still clear.

A nice bridge across part of it.

I am amazed at some of the cool wildlife you can still find here. One day, I’ll have my camera around when I see a fox. The bird pictured above likes to hang out along the river, as I’ve seen him a few times. I know absolutely nothing about birds, so I don’t know the type of bird this is. He’s pretty well conditioned to having people around as you can see how close I can get to snap a photo.

For those of you unaware, Thanksgiving isn’t celebrated here. Yeah, yeah, it’s a complete shocker. However, this being only the second Thanksgiving I’ve celebrated without my family, I wanted to do something other than work. Since part of this holiday has always been a little about excessive eating, I wanted a place that would mimic that well. I managed to wrangle up a few other coworkers and set about trying to get a booking at some place that would fit the needs of a Thanksgiving meal. I’d previously been to a pub somewhat near my flat which seemed to fit the bill called the Marquess Tavern. It has plenty of interesting beers, but the more important part was the choice of beef. To order it, you select a weights of beef from a chalkboard:

You pick the weight you want and it comes out freshly cut from the bone along with some green vegetables, potatoes, gravy and yorkshire pudding. We picked #1 and #6 which meant we ordered 5.5lbs of beef. Half of that (it came out on two plates) would look like this:

Tasty food! We managed to finish it all and felt good and full afterwards :). For those of you interested, here would be my companions for this years Thanksgiving:

On the left are Bhavin and Christiaan and on the right are Ben and Hang. It was a very international little group. We ate, imbibed and generally had a jolly old time.

The interior is very nice as well.

Anyhoo, there was no turkey or family, but it was a fun time. I’m hoping to try to get as many people as possible together sometime next year (yikes! that’s pretty close) and see how many of the choices of meat we can knock off the chalkboard.

So I’m walking back from lunch (mmmm, gnocchi and boar’s meat) and there’s a cloud that doesn’t look right. First of all, there’re no other clouds in the sky and this cloud is thick and black. Alas, I didn’t have a camera with me. We thought something was amiss and it’s true. The BBC is saying the it happened right near the future site for the 2012 Olympics. Crazy!

update: So it was apparently an abandoned warehouse on the Olympic site. The future home of the Olympics is pretty empty right now and isn’t very ready. But they’ve got a few more years, right? 🙂

Living in a capitol city has some major perks. One of them is the abundance of free museums. In my younger days (my first trip to London 15 years ago — wow!) I was amazed and awed by the British Museum. So, you would think, living a train or bus ride away, I’d be there every weekend. Stupid me, I hadn’t gone even once in 7 months. This past weekend, I vowed to change that and see how the place sized up when I was older and wiser.

Well, it’s still pretty impressive. It doesn’t feel as large and some of the pieces I remembered are smaller, but still very big (more on that in a minute). But it’s still an amazing museum. I need to book some tickets for Carolyn and myself to see the terracotta warriors this spring. But for my first of many trips back, I chose to focus on the Egyptian (non-mummy) part of the museum. I figure, with free admission, I can just pop in for an hour and really check out each part. So that’s what I did.

The classic front to the museum. I love how it’s on this seemingly tiny little charming street filled with old book and antique shops as well as a decent tourist pub and other touristy kind of food.

After you enter the main entrance, you find yourself in the Great Court which is definitely not the same as it was 15 years ago. It’s a decent combination of old and new and the glass roof gives a sensation of being outside without actually being there so you can still have works of art out in the open.

This head was part of a large statue. When I talked about how huge things felt merely big now, this would be it. Next to the head is the arm of the statue. In my younger days, I remember it being 100 feet long. Now, it’s a mere 20 feet long which would still make the full statue gigantic 🙂

This is the crown of the museum and a perfect example of colonialism taking other country’s heritage. The Rosetta Stone has the same text in Hieroglyphics, Demotic and Greek. It allowed people to finally understand the language of Ancient Egypt. What I find even more fascinating is that, by the time the stone was carved, no one really used Hieroglyphics for writing. It was the original written language of the Egyptians. However, as the written language evolved from pictures and symbol into more abstract characters, it was used more for ceremonial and religious purposes. Demotic (the language below it and more recognizable as a language to our modern eyes) was the day to day written language of the literate Egyptian. Greek, at this point, was the language of official Egypt, the language of the government.

What’s sometimes even harder to realize is that most people of this time couldn’t read any of these languages. Until the printing press and the Industrial Revolution democratized the written language by allowing for mass production of words, literacy was something that was unobtainable to most people. It wasn’t until the 19th and 20th century that literacy began to spread far and wide (particularly through the industrialized world — there’s still many people who cannot read or write).

Anyway, that was my first trip to the British Museum. It’s made me think and made me marvel at some amazing things. I don’t know which part will be next, but I hope to share it with you here.

Dina sent me a bunch of pictures from the Apple Festival and included some pictures from Carolyn’s visit. Among them was this cute one:

You might be asking what the hell I’m doing behind the very happy looking Carolyn. Well, the Tate Modern is a museum built in the remains of an old power station. Aside from a very nice selection of Francis Bacon paintings as well as a huge array of Modern British Art, they sponsor large installation pieces in the main part of the building. The previous piece was a series of multi-story slides to go down. The latest installation is this very large crack along the floor representing something about racism or colonialism in British history or something. I’m just making it a little wider.

Outside the museum is a large spider by Louis Bourgeois. Cool!