Name My Hippo!!

Car boot sales are the BEST events EVER!! They're basically yard sales, but instead of the customer going through the effort of locating and then driving around to all the different sales, the sellers bring their stuff to a big empty field, and the customers all pay about $1.50 to get in, and then everyone's all together to buy and sell! I went with Cerys, and Mary, who's the House Mistress of one of the two female boarding houses.

Cerys buying a measuring pole for geography activites.

 Mary, "pole dancing"

 I bought a few books, and Mary got me a real nice accordion portfolio (I tried to haggle down the price and the lady wasn't going for it, so when I was going to walk away, Mary just went ahead and bought it for me), and a bracelet with a retro sterling heart-shaped padlock; the maker's mark indicates that it was made in 1980, in Birmingham, but I haven't been able to identify the actual marker.

[I have no clue why the photo is sideways; I've tried reloading it but it still shows up the same.]

But the best thing I got is this:

It's a large plastic hippo! I bought it because it made me laugh. That's the only reason :) . So what should I name it? Leave your suggestion in the comment box, but nothing already famously attached to a hippo---it deserves an original name.

As many closely-concentrarted Starbucks as I'd find at home.

Bull Ring, Birmingham [Thursday]

Initially, I had no desire to visit the Bull Ring (I did not come here to see the malls) but as you can see on Wikipedia, there is some neato architecture in the area, so I figured I might as well. It's pretty bizarre to see so many beautiful, old buildings situated *right* in the middle of commercial districts devoted to materialism. For example, here is the Church of Saint Martin, visible between the east and west wings of the mall, and with the Bull Ring public market (not seen) immediately behind it:

The mall/shopping parts are CRAZY! I am *not* exaggerating when I say there are like, five different H&M stores scattered throughout the mall and the side streets. I--of course--enjoyed checking out all the jewelry. And I really got a kick out of the first floor of this department store, Selfridges, which has a layout that is a little tricky to describe so I won't, and which sold fun, trendy food, and knick-knacks and housewares. In a candy section, there was a Bull Ring bull made of jelly-bellies!

Being a factory worker during the Industrial Revolution would have SUCKED!!!

Jewellery Quarter, Birmingham  [Thursday]

Today I visited the Jewellery Quarter in Birmingham. It's all fancy, expensive metal & gem jewelry, so I didn't buy anything (that's more Christel's scene) or even visit any shops; I visited the area because of the museum! The guided tour was awesome!: the museum is in the front rooms of an old jewelry company, and the tour goes through the back factory areas which are *exactly* as they were left in 1981 when company paid off the workers and shut the doors. But it's pretty trippy to see, because since the owners and employees were super old-school and set in their ways, they hadn't done much to adapt with changing manufacturing or business technologies, so the workshop looks like something from the early 20th century, and the office (which I don't have pictures of) looks as if nothing had been changed since the 1940s.

I wish this was a better photo, but you can still kind of see the workshop exhaust fan's corroded blades from sulfuric acid fumes (part of the metal working process).