Is it Thursday again already?
Ah well, looks like there won’t be a Thursday Thirteen from me this week either.
As you probably deduced from reading my last post I returned home from London last Thursday. Unfortunately the only souvenir I brought with me was a nasty cold. The result was that I spent the next 4 days mostly lounging around on the couch, oozing various fluids, coughing parts of my lungs up and just generally feeling like crap.
Not the best fun I had in a while. But it’s getting better and I am able to actually concentrate on something again (even though I still feel too lousy to actually work). Today I even went on my morning run again for the first time in 2 weeks. And considering that I had to stop frequently to let a coughing fit pass or blow my nose it wasn’t too bad.
Still, the London trip was fantastic. A week is exactly the right amount of time for me to spend in a big city: enough time to get re-acquainted with old favorite places and find some new ones, but not long enough to get all fed up with the noise and the hustle and the millions of people everywhere.
Oh, and it gave me enough time to go book-shopping. Unfortunately I had a 10kg weight-restriction for my luggage (one of the downsides of ultracheap airlines), so I couldn’t go quite all out with the book buying. But I managed to cram 25 books into my backpack anyway. And since they were all either from used book stores or Oxfam, they cost me about 30 Pounds altogether. And even though, as usual, I bought many books I had never heard of before, just because I liked the title or cover or something else caught my eye, I also found quite a few books from my wishlist (a Neil Gaiman, 2 Richard Russo, a Kate Atkinson, Douglas Adams, JG Ballard etc.). So in that respect the trip was very successful and enjoyable.
Besides that I went to a somewhat unusual Bookcrossing meetup with several british Bookcrossers. Unusual because one of us went up onto the fourth plinth on Trafalgar Square to educate the masses about the concept of Bookcrossing and to give out more than 160 books by just throwing them down from there. The rest of us went around the square and gave out more books to everyone who seemed interested. The plinth thing is part of some kind of art project that’s going on this summer, called One & Other. (You can watch our BCers one hour stint here.) It certainly was a new exerience for me, but I had a lot of fun. And it was great to meet some BCers face to face. And the subsequent visit to the nearest pub wasn’t too bad either.
Apart from that highlight I found 3 other great things which will surely become part of my favorites:
Abney Park Cemetery
It took me ages to find the place, because I was too stubborn to ask for directions and I just can’t seem to get the hang of the bus system in London. But it definitely was worth the long search. A beautiful old, derelict cemetery with an abandoned and crumbling church right in the middle. I only regretted to have gone there in the brightest afternoon sunshine. A nightly visit would have been more appropriate. Maybe next time.
But I took about a hundred photos anyway. I’ll see if I can post a couple of them later on.
Hunterian Museum
This one is inside the Royal College of Surgeons and it proved a bit hard to find as well, since when I first went looking for it on Monday (when it is closed) I couldn’t for the life of me find any sign with the name on it. When I stubbornly went back on Tuesday it was open and they had put out a sign so people would actually know which building it is in.
The collection itself is splendid: thousands of pickled body parts with all kinds of deformities, dead babies and foetuses in all stages of development, skulls and bones and pretty much just any kind of anatomical object you can think of. All very impressive and educational, and what can I say: I just love to look at dead things.
Although I have to admit, the one thing that I would have loved to take with me was this sculpture of a panther eating a rabbit in the art gallery part of the museum:
(Sorry for the bad quality of the photo. Since taking pictures inside the museum is forbidden I just grabbed this one from the interactive panorama thingy on the website.)
I have no idea why I was to taken with the thing, but I know if I ever see an affordable replica of it somewhere I will buy it.
Wellcome Collection – “Exquisite Bodies” exhibition
This one was a random find. I had never heard of the collection itself and I only saw the posters for the exhibition in the Tube stations. Of course when I read “an exhibition of anatomical models” I knew I had to go have a look.
The exhibition was pretty interesting. Of course I had seen anatomical models before: mostly made from wax, or the newer ones from plastics, they are those kinds of things where you can simulate an autopsy by removing the abdominal wall and single organs. But it was interesting to see how the art of making those models developed and I was surprised to see that the overwhelming majority of the things show female cadavers, pregnant ones mostly. Either the female anatomy and the marvel of pregnancy is very much more complex and needs more explanations for educational purposes, or the men who made these models were all just obsessed with naked female bodies.
The rest of the collection is equally entertaining. Herny Wellcome was a collector of a very special sort. He collected pretty much everything even marginally connected with health and the human body. You can probably imagine that he ended up with a pretty eclectic pile of stuff. Definitely a place to come back to on later visits.
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Apart from those new finds of course I also had to pay a visit tothe big 3 of my old favorites: the Natural History Museum, the Science Museum and the British Museum. All of them never cease to delight me in their various ways.
So, I had a pretty interesting week. But as much as I love London, being back home, sleeping in my own bed, having some peace and quiet and all that is really nice, too.
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