March 3, 2012

Off to the park...

...and the cemetery!

After my exhausting trip to Paris I wanted a nice, relaxing day.  We decided to take a trip to Highgate Cemetery – one of London’s little treasures.  Highgate was only about half an hour away from us and it made a great day trip.  It was made in the early 19^th century and is crammed full of graves.  All the graves are covered with ivy, moss, and green life.  It was such a peaceful area and was great to look at all the old graves.  We even met Professor McGonagall there!  When we first walked into the cemetery we saw a beautiful orange cat sitting on a grave, reading the gravestone.  I am not even kidding – the cat was totally reading it!  It was just chilling there, looking at the headmarker.

A magical cat

For real!!!!!  McGonagall!!!!

               We got to see George Elliot’s grave, which was a small thing without any significant marker.  But then we also saw Karl Marx’s grave, which was complete with a huge dedication to him and a giant bust atop the massive monument.  I’ll definitely be needing one of those for my grave (of my head of course, not Karl’s).  Oh, and you can still be buried in the Highgate Cemetery, so I’d like to start purchasing a plot of land there (even though I’m sure it would cost millions of pounds…guess I’ll start saving now!).

Graves time

George Elliot.  And it may not look small here, but it was surrounded by much taller and bigger ones

Karl!

This is the oldest grave in Highgate

THOUSANDS of graves!

Friends!  Thanks to Lyssa with an awkward hand placement... 

This was a really weirdly shaped tree that looked like an animal or something...
so I decided to ride it.

Everything was COVERED with ivy!

                 We also happened upon a fox running through the graves.  We chased it of course for a bit, trying to get a picture of the thing until we got a good look at it and saw that it was limping really badly.  It’s back right leg looked crushed and it was pretty scraggily.  I hope McGonagall didn’t do that to him.

Our fox friend running away from us

Peeking around some graves

                There was a great park on our way back to the tube that we stopped at for a bit to explore.  It was a beautiful park with lots of families playing with their kids at.  The flowers were just starting to bloom and it was beautiful.  We are definitely going to take a picnic there sometime. 

While we were exploring around the park a disturbing girl in a bright pink dress and nasty dreads was skipping around the park.  Upon closer examination we found out it was actually a man.  Super creepy.  I pretended to look through the pictures on my camera but really took a couple pictures of him, and I think he knew exactly what I was doing.  Way sketchy.  On our way out of the park we discovered that the park was right next-door to an insane asylum…so maybe that’s where our pink little friend came from.  This was some of the worst community planning I’d ever seen – who came up with the brilliant idea to put a historic cemetery, a wonderful park that families frequent, and an insane asylum all next to each other?  Not smart.

The shman

Cool phone box outside the tube stop