Tuesday 29 March 2011

Stephen Speilberg's assistant

Mike and I (well Mike mainly) decided we should film a stop motion film, set to one of our favourite songs about the Big Bad Wolf. I was a little hesitant at first, but we had a great time, taking hundreds of photos all through Woolwich and Royal Arsenal. I got to be very silly and prance along the grass and sit on canons, but best of all, the final result is great and can be seen on facebook! http://www.facebook.com/video/video.php?v=10150149704088113

Woolwich Ferry

Mike lives in Woolwich, which instead of having a bridge, has two ferrys which cart the cars across the Thames. At night (and on Sundays) one of the boats is parked just outside Mike's flat. I love the ferry, especially when I can see it from the window! Especially as it is endorsed by Boris!

Flowers

Bristol Zoo is part of the Zoological Gardens, so they have beautiful flowers there.I took these, which were by the seals and penguins. I love the light on them. Mike says I could photoshop them, but I havent learnt to do that yet!

My monkey at the zoo!

Mike and I got the little kids lunch boxes at the zoo, you could choose what you wanted in them, and one of the options was jelly! Apart from us forgetting the spoons, it was fun to try and get the jelly out of the countainers with our tongues! I love that Mike is so silly and always makes me giggle, I love this photo of him trying to measure his 'wings!'

A date at the Zoo!

Quite a while ago, Mike had a week and a bit off of work so he came down to Bristol. Before we both went back to >London, we had to go to the Zoo, because the weather was fabulous! Really sunny and lovely and even warm! Bristol Zoo has massive gardens too, and is a lovely place for a day out, I highly reccomend it! They have lions, and two new lion babies, and flamingoes, lots of birds, a whole night animal section, as well as red pandas, penguins, and a huge aquarium!My photos are of some of the lizards, a little prarie dog and the butterflies, which is my favourite part, if you stay long enough they will land on you!They also have an area where you can go> in with the Lemurs and they walk around you. When we got there, they had just put out food for them, so they were everywhere!

Monday 7 March 2011

Ironbridge

On my way back home this weekend, I did a little detour to Ironbridge....never do it in the gray, bleary weather! I decided to go because the weather was lovely in Bristol. Sadly, by the time I got to Telford it was awful. Ironbridge is a nice little place, basically it is the birthplace of industry! It was the first iron bridge in the entire world, built by Thomas Telford. It is now full of cute little shops, and even a fab little bakery that does these lovely cupcakes!

Tuesday 1 March 2011

Mike and Me :)

I have been after Mike for ages, trying to get a nice photo of us both. Chris is also a photographer and I got him to take some nice shots of Mike and me together, even though Mike tried to make lots of silly faces! I can't describe how happy it made me to get a nice shot for all my scrapbooking albums, as well for my phone! I loved that we got one where we were both smiling - there were quite a few with eyes closed and my tongue out, just to be awkward! Chris did a great job of getting one that is very good of us both!

The boys

Mike and his mate Chris don't get to see each other very often, and when they do get together they are very silly, as this photo shows! They are both pilots, but I think the silliness comes from within, not from their training hopefully! This was on the way back to the car, and I asked them to turn around for a photo, this is what I got! Silly billies!

Flowers

The gardeners in Conwy are obviously very talented, there are flowers all over the town. They were really a lot more in bloom than everywhere else I have visited recently, and lovely and bright. I took some close up photos of the bright yellow! There were also lovely red and purple ones too, but I liked how sunny and bright the yellow ones were!

Conwy Castle

And here is the famous Conwy Castle! It really is immense, and has walls which go all around the town. You can walk all around on top of the walls if they are open, but they weren't open untill March, which was a shame, and it was getting mighty chilly, so it was good to get these shots in before we walked back to the car!

It wouldn't be complete without a lamppost

Conwy is a lovely little town, full of teashops, B and Bs, old toy stores, barbers and all sorts of cute little shops. We had a nice time wandering around the town, playing with the toys in the toy shops (like big kids) and had cream teas in a lovely little upstairs tea room. As we were walking, I spotted a hotel with this lovely little lamppost! It wouldn't be a holiday without a photo of one!

The old railway bridge

Conwy has a castle, and originally had a bridge which let people drive across the river, and into the town, adjacent to the castle. When it was built, some smart soul decided to make it look a bit more like the castle, so it would blend in with it's surroundings. And tada! This bridge was made. Sadly, with the heavier traffic and lorries, they had to close the bridge and make a new, uglier one, but this one is still open for people to come and look at.

Conwy harbour, Wales

After my experiences with photos in Pill, a couple weeks ago, I learnt that I really enjoy taking photos of boats (at least when the weather is nice!) and Conwy Harbour is just beautiful. It was quite cold but the sky was lovely and blue and there were lots of boats kept in the harbour and on the sand bank. I thought it looked a bit like a postcard!

The smallest house in Great Britain

After visiting Manchester, Mike came and collected me and we drove to stay with our friends Chris and Liz. On the Tuesday we had some time off, so went to visit Conwy bay, which is up in north Wales. It is also home to the smallest house in Great Britain! It is a little tiny red house overlooking the bay. I had to have my photo, which everyone says is to scale, but I was actually a tiny bit taller than the doorframe! On the weekend, you are able to pay and go inside, but I'm not so sure I would like to live there, I am too accustomed to having lots of space!

Old Trafford

When we were up at the top of the spire, I could see Old Trafford, which is home to Manchester United Football club. I knew it couldn't be too far, so I convinced Nadeem we at least needed to SEE the building, as it is quite famous. Needless to say, it is just a large stadium, and we couldn't get inside, but it is ABSOLUTELY massive, and must be lots of fun when the team are actually playing!

A very weird museum

From the outside, the Imperial War museum is a very strange looking place, with large shiny curved walls, and a tall spire. It is equally as strange inside, with sloping floors and zig-zag walls. It has a few tanks outside too, but you can't climb on them, which is a shame. Because the museum was free, we were able to pay only 60p! for both of us to go in a lift all the way to the top of the spire. It was great to look around Manchester from so high up, we could see really far, but I think the very shakey, wrackety lift was a bit too freaky for my liking!

Inside the Imperial War Museum

We weren't really quite sure what else to do in Manchester, so we headed off to the Imperial War Museum, which was a taxi ride away. It was free, and small, but really interesting, and had a good collection of WW2 memorabilia as well as lots of tanks! There seemed to be a lot of kids there too. They also had a navy war exhibit going on, which was great, as they talked about the battle of Narvik, where Nadeem and I visited in Norway, in the summer!

Pretty little flowers

This was my favourite photo of all the cathedral photos I took. It's a little blurry, but it shows the lovely purple and white flowers that were all over the lawn in front of the cathedral.I tried my hardest to not step on any, and get a close enough shot to show them at grass level, but this was as close as I could get!

A cathedral in the centre of all the shopping

I do love cathedrals, and haven't been able to take some good photos of them for a while, so I was excited to discover that there is a (quite little) cathedral right in the centre of the shopping bit in Manchester. I loved that the sky was nice and blue and I could show the stone off in it's lovely colour! There were even choirboys singing too! Manchester was bombed quite a lot, and so it has an interesting combination of old and new buildings, as well as a lot of industrial buildings, so it was nice to see something pretty! In terms of a cathedral, it's not very big, but it had a lovely little garden in front with white and purple snowdrops and little flowers. It seemed a great place to sit for a while and relax after a day's shopping!

Census Bus

Right in the centre of the shopping area was this giant purple double decker bus. It was there to remind you about the National Census, which is done this year. There are quite a few billboards with the purples buses on them around Bristol. I hadn't really heard tons about it yet, but the purple bus certainly reminded me about it!

Sackville Gardens, Manchester

On Saturday, I took the train up (very early) to go to the UKSEDS conference, which was being held in Manchester. The conference itself wasn't terribly great, so Nadeem and I went out exploring instead. On our walk, the first place we encountered were these Gardens, which were in a lovely square with pretty little flowers!

Cupcakes and candles

Back when I went home one weekend, we had Becky (Shelby's friend from school) and her family round for tea. It had been Becky's birthday so we got these awesome cupcakes from this little bakery in Telford to have instead of cake! I love the detail and how perfect they look!