sunday, 5 mar 06

on sunday i wanted to check out st. pancras churchyard, where mary wollstonecraft, mother of mary shelley of frankenstein fame, is supposed to be buried. (on a side note: i was in AP euro history in high school. one time we had to dress up like historical figures for a little party. my friend laura got to be mary wollstonecraft.. she spouted feminist rhetoric and carried a little baby around that was supposed to be mary shelley. so that ramped up the geekness a notch. :) however, when i got off the tube and checked out the church, i couldn't seem to find a graveyard.. but a young man emerged from within the church and asked me if i wanted to see an art exhibit in the basement. unbeknownst to me, the 'basement' was where the crypts were. and i said, hey, does howdy doody have wooden balls?

ok, i didn't. but i should have.

the exhibit was modern: paintings, sculptures, some installations, and a slideshow. there were supposed to be two, but one of the projectors' bulbs had burnt out. the guy himself had a few installations, one being bunches of balloons suspended from the ceiling (very contrary in such a creepy space), and another was a setup of tiny figurines he'd collected and interchanged. most were of the simpsons; some were ones i didn't recognize. but they were all messed up. marge would have bart's head, homer would have marge's hair, and so on. they were so small i couldn't imagine the patience it took to do all of them. in the back was a robot (so he said, hehe) made out of tube maps. that was cool. i took pictures, natch.
now, the thing is, i've sinced looked up mary wollstonecraft's gravesite.. and it wasn't at that church. that would explain why i couldn't find a graveyard. apparently old st. pancras church, where i was supposed to go, is up the street a ways. oh well, at least it wasn't a total wash.

what else did i do sunday.. well, i walked from the st. pancras station (marvellous architecture, btw, but under heavy construction) to the old street station, which was much longer than i thought it would be. i didn't get a good sense of scale on the maps that i had, and my legs paid for it. the street i was on also changed names at least three times. not a fan of the british street system, am i.

anyway, i went to old street to seek out bunhill fields, an old burying ground with some slightly famous people. no one i'm incredibly interested in, but intriguing nonetheless. as i approached, a passerby pointed to it and said, 'dead centre of london.' everyone's a comedian. the thing about bunhill fields is, you can't walk on it. i supposed that's for the best, given its age. it's just not the same taking photos through fences. i couldn't get close enough to read some of the stories, either.. and you need to set some time aside in order to read a british gravestone, lemme tell ya.

after that, i sussed out a little shop i'd read about, but got a little lost in the process. while wandering around, i saw a sign on a shop/bar/pub/club/ok, i couldn't tell what it was - for a free(!) electronic show on tuesday called multivitamins. i jotted it down and managed to make my way to the tube and, subsequently, my hotel.
i lazed around for a bit, figuring hey, it's only sunday. people still go out on sunday nights, right? except i couldn't find anything that sounded palatable. luckily they were showing the 'top 100 pop videos' on.. channel 4, i think. i was happily sucked into that for the duration of the night. these were videos voted for by the viewers. it was cool to see them pick video's i'd maybe seen once or not at all. 'thriller' won, btw.

pics