Columbarium

Yesterday we spent the day hanging out with our friends in Oakland, starting with lunch at an awesome all-you-can-eat Korean barbecue place.

Barbecuing up some deliciousness!

Then we went for a long walk around a cemetery, which sounds weird but our friend assured us that it has beautiful views and lots of people go there just to check out the scenery. Which actually still sounds weird, until you go there and wander around until you are on top of a hill overlooking all of Oakland and the Bay:

Facing in a slightly different direction, you can even see San Francisco and the Bay Bridge:

SF is on the right end of the horizon

Also on the cemetery grounds is a huge building that was labeled "columbarium" - we had no idea what that meant, so we went inside to check it out. It turns out it's a building for displaying urns, and it seemed like it belonged in Hogwarts.

The columbarium was huge, and made up of many small rooms all connected through little doors and passageways and at slightly different levels from each other. The walls were all stone, but other than that all the rooms were different - some were greenhouses, some were open to the outdoors, some had little gardens and fountains.

Many of the rooms had pretty little murals or stained glass pieces tucked away in them:

Even the urns themselves were all different, and most were not actually shaped like traditional urns. A popular style was for one niche to have multiple urns from a family, each shaped like a book, as if they were volumes sitting on a shelf:

I ended up enjoying the columbarium even more than the cemetery - even though we spent quite a while wandering around inside, I'm sure we didn't see all of it. I'd love to go back with a book and spend a full afternoon exploring the rooms and reading in one of the serene gardens.