If you want to check out why I decided we HAD to visit High Gate Cemetery, just do a Google search for it. Here is a link to their website: http://www.highgate-cemetery.org/
It's a rather exclusive private cemetery. People wanted to be buried here because it was away from the crowded and dirty London. It costs quite a bit to be buried here and many of the graves are VERY old.
We took the train out to North London and then rode a bus to this little neighborhood where the cemetery lies. On the walk up the hill to the cemetery, we passed this cute little village of houses below:
Once we arrived at the cemetery, we had to wait outside for a while because they did not open their gates until exactly 11 am! And they only serve 10 people at a time for a 1-hour tour! We were lucky cause we were the 3rd and 4th persons there!
This place is located on a hill and so it has winding paths all up and down the hill. All of the monuments are just so amazing...because it was a sunny day, the cemetery didn't feel creepy at all to me. I was kinda bummed about that :P
This is called Egypt Row or Walk or something like that...it was so fascinating because of the Victorian's fascination with Egyptology. They wanted to mimic the tombs in Egypt and so they created this. The tombs in here were so pricey that only a few were purchased, many of them remain empty today!
This was my favorite monument of all. If you can see the epitaph, you can see that this guy was a "menagerist" - the story was that he had a traveling collection of exotic animals and that's why his sleeping lion is forever with him.
And this guy here was a boxer who had a beloved dog.
There's tons more pictures of the cemetery that I could post but I figured if you cared enough to see what the rest of the cemetery was like you could go search online :)
We made our way across the hill and found a lovely park with tons of people playing out in the beautiful day! Ramin took this artistic shot :)
Then we killed some time and went to lunch and made our way down to the stadium. I think we arrived there almost 2 hours early and there were already tons of people there! We were decked out in our gear of course!
We sat up pretty high (which is better to do while watching soccer) and so we had a great view of the game!
This is a shot of the players warming up. Our telephoto lens on the camera was pretty sweet!
They had a nice tribute before the start of the game for this guy. He's a player on another team who suffered some heart problems and collapsed on the field the week prior to this game.
Final score: Arsenal 3 - Aston Villa 0 - WE WON!
We weren't allowed to take pictures during the actual game while the stadium was full - but I can tell you that the game was sold out and it was completely packed. Ramin says it holds 60,000 people!
And that's the end of the day. We made our way back to our hotel neighborhood, grabbed some dinner at the local Pizza Hut (dine in restaurant of course) and then went to sleep. Pretty relaxing actually!
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