Bimingham Adventure Day Two | City Centre

To finish of my Birmingham blog posts, which have taken me so long to write oops, today I'm going to be posting about day two of our trip. Day one can be read here and Slam Dunk festival day three can be found here for anyone who hasn't already checked them out. As day one was a more chilled and relaxed day we decided that for day two we were going to travel to Birmingham city centre and check out what the city life was like there. It was extremely opposite to how calm it was on the first day and we had a jam packed day of shopping, exploring and just being a general tourist. I really love writing these too.

   

   

We got the bus to the city centre, and thankfully did not get lost on the way by some miracle. We got off at the Bullring shopping centre where we spent most of the day. The place is absolutely huge, like four floors with two separate buildings packed full of shops, as well as endless amounts of roads with interconnecting malls, markets and shops it was crazy trying to find our way around. There were just too many places to visit. There was such a beautiful cathedral right across from the shopping centre and I really liked how the old merged with the new it was nice. I spent way too much time looking around in Superdrug as the Superdrug in the UK is much bigger and better. Plus there were shops such as Victoria Secret and Krispy Kreme that we don't have in Dublin and I was super excited to visit. We picked up four doughnuts to try and they were so delicious and aesthetically pleasing I must say. How pretty and tasty do they look?

After exploring and buying a few bits in the shopping mall we decided to explore the streets. The cute cacti are from Urban Outfitters. The place seemed never ending and we were so tired after visiting almost every shop the place had to offer that we didn't end up going too far. I had wanted to visit some more historic sights but we got slightly lost and ended heading back to shop and took a visit to shops such as Lush, which are always a good choice.

   

   

   

All our shopping had worn us down so we decided to grab Pizza Hut for dinner, We got a Margarita to share with fries and bottomless Pepsi, which came in about five different flavours like cherry and vanilla it was so interesting. Again look how good the food looks. It makes me so hungry looking at it. Pizza Hut do the best thick pizza bases I've ever tried. So good.

   

We just headed back to the hotel after food as it took about an hour on the bus. Who knew shopping could be so tiring? Although we have most of the same shops back in Dublin it's always interesting to see what they're like in other countries. I'd also never been to a shopping centre so big before it was so intimidating but so cool I really wish we had something like it over here it's a lot of fun, but bad for your bank I guess. 

With this post is the end of my little Birmingham travel posts I hope you've enjoyed reading them as I did writing them.

Has anyone ever been in Birmingham city centre before or the Bullring shopping centre before? 

Belfast Trip & Adventure

I have no idea why this has taken me so long to get around to writing, I've been meaning to do it for a week. Following my last post, as I went to a festival up in Belfast, which is 2 and a half hours from my house, I stayed up there for two days and decided to be as tourist as I could in those two days. Being the photographer I think I am, I took an abundance of photos because I think the city is really beautiful and wanted to try taking more photos to capture moments. This was also the first independent trip I've been on so it was so exciting and momentous for me. That being said, this post will most likely be super long but pretty colourful.

   

    

On the first day we traveled up we got lost and ended up just walking down streets for a while because I had read the map backwards. It didn't bother me though because I love it there.

We did the typical tourist thing by going to a new place but going somewhere that you've been to before, we got a Starbucks. We chilled there for a while until we got back to our hotel to get ready for the festival, as seen in my previous blog post. 

   

     

Again, we did the thing and didn't explore at all. We went for dinner in a Nando's that was conveniently attached to our hotel. It's probably the prettiest Nando's I've seen to date. It was delicious as always and we got to meet Josh from Twenty One Pilots outside our hotel after the meal, I'm still fangirling. I already blogged about the actual concert so I'll just move on to our second day.

Our second day was our exploring and shopping day. We explored most of the main streets and spent most of our time in Victoria Square, the main shopping centre. It's the prettiest shopping centre I've ever seen. It's indoors and outdoors at the same time. The roof is made out of glass and it goes up super high up to this platform that you can see a three hundred and sixty degree view of the city and the mountains you can see past it. It's such an amazing sight but the top of the building is kind of like a greenhouse and it gets super hot so you can't really stay up there for long without melting. 

They had some sort of Alice in Wonderland themed thing going on when we were there, which I got super excited about. They had scenes from the whole movie there, both the original and the Tim Burton version. They had a mini maze for children, which we still did that was actually fun even though it was tiny and nothing like a real maze. They also had a cute little reenactment of the Mad Hatter's tea party which was actually so real feeling. Everything was just really cute and it really brought back my love for Alice in Wonderland and a lot of the things in it. Why don't shopping malls/centres near me do this kind of stuff?

We shopped for most of the day and bought a few clothes items and other bits and just wandered really. The shops were basically the exact same to what we have back home too so it was nice to see the shops with different designs and layouts. We went to the Disney store, which is tiny compared to the Dublin one and I got a Winnie the Pooh teddy bear that I've wanted for a while because it was cheaper there. It's my favourite thing from the trip, thanks Jack. It rained for the second half of the day and we got too cold to explore half the places I'd wanted to visit.

The last thing we did was go out for a fancy meal to an Italian restaurant. We got dough balls, which are the best starter ever, just saying and pizza. My pizza is the plain one, what a surprise. It was so nice but I felt sick half way through the meal and we had to go back to the hotel earlier than we should've which was really disappointing, I blame the rain making me sick. Even though we stayed in the hotel for the rest of the trip it was really nice to go somewhere else for a change, I never go away at all anymore.

I never went away for like a really short trip before and it's actually so nice and not as expensive as a week holiday, obviously but still. I hope to come back really soon or go somewhere and do something like this again. This post was really odd but I hope you enjoyed the travel journal sort of thing.

Anyone go anywhere nice over the summer?