So! On Wednesday I went to a couple lectures and then found myself done in the middle of the day. I texted Meg, the girl I knew from high school, and we decided to meet halfway between our two respective houses at Camden. I live in Belsize Park and she lives in Kentish Town, so this seemed like a pretty decent idea. We knew there was an open air market dealie at Camden so we wandered down to the wharf to have a look.
The next day I went to another lecture that got done at noon! So I went to the British Museum!!! I spent about three hours looking at the Greco-Roman exhibits on the ground floor and then was getting kind of tired so I decided to leave the other floors for a rainy day (but I will definitely be coming back)!
Oooh, a bridge into the flea market!
Once there, we spent a couple hours idly wandering through the stalls. They are selling a lot of weird stuff there. And maybe hitting the ganja just a wee bit, based on some of the items being sold. Also, I think there may have been an overstock of giant horse / farrier ironworks at some point, because they are scattered all over the market. It was kind of awesome. I should have taken a picture! Seriously, maybe fifty or sixty random double-life-sized sculptures of horses getting their hooves checked. haha.
After a while we got bored and Meg knew of a Pound store near her house, so we walked up to Kentish Town. This is a church that we passed:
This picture is out of order and I'm too lazy to fix it, but this is a small horse head over a shop. I don't know what Camden's obsession with horses is, but I approve.
The next day I went to another lecture that got done at noon! So I went to the British Museum!!! I spent about three hours looking at the Greco-Roman exhibits on the ground floor and then was getting kind of tired so I decided to leave the other floors for a rainy day (but I will definitely be coming back)!
I hopped on a random bus towards Hampstead Heath, that being roughly the direction towards my house, and ultimately decided to see what the Heath was all about. I stayed on the bus until it dropped me in a really nice neighborhood. After a few tries, I found the street that dead-ended in the park. Now, I could see on the map that Hampstead Heath was a really, really big park, but I wanted to walk around anyway. The problem was that I didn't have a map OF the park except for a rough approximately on my little map of London that noted when the terrain moved from "pasture" to "dense forest." After two hours of pulling myself up steep hills, walking across vast distances, slopping through mud, and trying to judge direction using the setting sun, I emerged on a street with a bus stop -- conveniently, the bus that runs right past Swiss Cottage, hooray! So I will probably not make the mistake of misjudging the Heath's size again, and next time I go I will have a map with me, haha.
This is a lake I found.
Here are some swans. I call this phase of my photography the "When People Were Still On Trails and I did not Feel Lost" phase.
Now we're entering the "Wow, this is actually a pretty legitimate park" phase.
And this is the "Wow, a man made fence must mean that people still exist in London" phase.
Some trees. I bet this will look super cool in the autumn!
Oh hey, there's London. It seems really far away.
But it's closer if you use the zoom setting! I was trying to find a landmark called the BT Tower which is very close to my campus, but I couldn't distinguish it with my camera. : (
Anyway, I had a good afternoon and got a couple miles of walking under my belt, so I am pretty happy with my experience. I helped an old lady find the correct bus (this is the third time people have asked me for help with bus routes, which is scary because I really don't know what I'm doing).
Today I went to a lecture that was meant for the Archivists but I figured it couldn't hurt to attend. It was boring. Then I went to a meet and greet afterwards and ate very spicy Indian snacks and hung out with a guy from Slovenia who is also doing Digital Humanities. The clubs and societies were out in full force in front of the quad building so I signed up for some stuff like Dodgeball Club, Salsa Club, and Hiking Club, haha. I also got a copy of the student paper, and it is really good. Like, really good. It makes the Daily Nebraskan look like a joke (which, let's be honest, it kind of is). When I checked my goody bag of free junk later, I found that I ended up with an Oyster card holder from the London Symphony Orchestra (a little plastic wallet that holds your metro pass, in other words), a lighter, some chewing gum, and some gumming paper for folding my own tobacco? That's random, I want to know which booth passed that out, haha.
I went to a book store by campus and snooped about, then decided to hop on a random bus and see what happened. Pretty soon I could tell I was not heading in the right direction at all, so I changed at King's Cross and waited for a bus that said it was heading to Swiss Cottage, although my stop was at the very end of the route. Three hours later I disembarked near my house. Haha. Fortunately it was a double decker bus so I sat in the top at the front and pretended I was driving in a video game. I saw a lot of neat stuff though! What a cheap tour of London! We had passed a mega grocery store on the way that I walked to after I got off the bus. I am pretty excited to have discovered this monster super store so close, because before I had been taking a bus to Camden Town which is horrifically busy.
We had another building meeting about internet and I am starting to get frustrated. The majority of people want to just get something simple that costs around £40 a month but gets the job done. I am in this majority. The tech guys that we put in charge of getting internet want to run fiber optics into the building, etc, etc, find massive routers and tie them together.....but none of them are willing to call the places that need to be called in order to arrange anything. SOooooo tomorrow I'm calling a company to ask which rooms have phone lines wired and then armed with this information I am going to get six or seven people on my floor to go in on a plan. People on the ground floor have already organized together in this manner, and I'd rather have internet sooner than later so yeah. I feel bad because the fewer people that sign on the more the fiber optics thing is going to cost for them, but they are taking too long and accomplishing nothing. Haha.
Tomorrow I actually have quite a bit of stuff to do at school. Lots of report writing lecture sessions and senate house tours, etc. I'm not really sure what that means, but I will show up with a writing utensil just in case!
Later!
Today I went to a lecture that was meant for the Archivists but I figured it couldn't hurt to attend. It was boring. Then I went to a meet and greet afterwards and ate very spicy Indian snacks and hung out with a guy from Slovenia who is also doing Digital Humanities. The clubs and societies were out in full force in front of the quad building so I signed up for some stuff like Dodgeball Club, Salsa Club, and Hiking Club, haha. I also got a copy of the student paper, and it is really good. Like, really good. It makes the Daily Nebraskan look like a joke (which, let's be honest, it kind of is). When I checked my goody bag of free junk later, I found that I ended up with an Oyster card holder from the London Symphony Orchestra (a little plastic wallet that holds your metro pass, in other words), a lighter, some chewing gum, and some gumming paper for folding my own tobacco? That's random, I want to know which booth passed that out, haha.
I went to a book store by campus and snooped about, then decided to hop on a random bus and see what happened. Pretty soon I could tell I was not heading in the right direction at all, so I changed at King's Cross and waited for a bus that said it was heading to Swiss Cottage, although my stop was at the very end of the route. Three hours later I disembarked near my house. Haha. Fortunately it was a double decker bus so I sat in the top at the front and pretended I was driving in a video game. I saw a lot of neat stuff though! What a cheap tour of London! We had passed a mega grocery store on the way that I walked to after I got off the bus. I am pretty excited to have discovered this monster super store so close, because before I had been taking a bus to Camden Town which is horrifically busy.
We had another building meeting about internet and I am starting to get frustrated. The majority of people want to just get something simple that costs around £40 a month but gets the job done. I am in this majority. The tech guys that we put in charge of getting internet want to run fiber optics into the building, etc, etc, find massive routers and tie them together.....but none of them are willing to call the places that need to be called in order to arrange anything. SOooooo tomorrow I'm calling a company to ask which rooms have phone lines wired and then armed with this information I am going to get six or seven people on my floor to go in on a plan. People on the ground floor have already organized together in this manner, and I'd rather have internet sooner than later so yeah. I feel bad because the fewer people that sign on the more the fiber optics thing is going to cost for them, but they are taking too long and accomplishing nothing. Haha.
Tomorrow I actually have quite a bit of stuff to do at school. Lots of report writing lecture sessions and senate house tours, etc. I'm not really sure what that means, but I will show up with a writing utensil just in case!
Later!
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