Birmingham

First Day as a Tourist in England

Dee dee do da day. . .. what is that horrible noise? My alarm!!! Oh no I'm late. . . wait?!?! It's our day off. . .oh it's Susan's alarm. Whew okay I can go back to sleep. . . Three hours later. 11:00 AM. . .Okay time to get up and actually do something on our glorious day off!

Pad down the insane yellow hallway to the bathroom to brush my teeth and get ready for the day. . . Then to the dining room to rumage for some brunch. . . which ended up consisting of cereal, banana, and a scone with Nutella. Yum! Scramble to call Dad on his way to work. . . about 5:40 AM at home. . . (It's almost 1:00PM here) Then off to the bus station to spend the afternoon in Birmingham! Yah!

We arrive and find our stop. . .not easy when you have many people's opinion spouting out sporadically. But find it we did. And to our delight, we found ourselves on the upper deck of a double decker bus! Hooray! What a way to see the city right? It was so neat the brick building flying by, the ceilings of the tunnels just out of reach, and the trees cut so we could go under.

About a half an hour later we arrived in the city centre of Birmingham. .. Off to the shops we went, getting all our supplies that we were lacking for the upcoming adventure week plus a few extras! (what's a girl to do when there's all these great shops :) Walking up the way we saw a gorgeous church steeple rising in the distance. So we quickly cut into a coffee shop for some sustenance and meandered our way to see the beautiful moss covered building. (Pictured behind us at the top)

We then got distracted by a book store and more shopping. .. then it was time to meet the guys back at the bus stop. Sirens screamed and policemen were crowding the streets. What was going on? Were they doing a training excercise? Hmm anyway, we needed to find the bus stop. We only did one circle before finding which way we needed to go.

Met up with the guys, and then discovered that the stop we had got off at was the wrong stop to get us back to Halesowen. So off we went for a jaunt around the city centre to find the right stop. More police swarmed and we found out that there had been riots going on down the street. Anit facists and right wingers had gotten into it apparently.

So we continued on. Admiring the architecture and beauty. Finally we found the right bus stop ( or so we thought ). Tired and ready to be back in our yellow prison. . .sort of. We got on and settled in. Only to find out that we had the wrong bus and were on our way to Dudley not Halesowen. . .So going 25 minutes out of our way, we then were able to get on the right bus and make our way safely home!

And that was my first day as a tourist in England!