My weekend in Birmingham was great! I went up thursday late afternoon and arrived at Mike's around dinner time. It was a very relaxed evening and most of it was spent studying (lots and lots of microeconomics to read).

On friday Mike went in early to the mech eng building to design a part that apparently was just a square with a hole in the middle! And they're supposed to be graduate students!! He didnt even bring the part home for show & tell....hehe...we came back, baked bread in the bread machine while we went out to a free lunchtime concert at a hall at UBHAM. There were three artists: guitar, singer, and recorder and the concert was just lovely. Mike & I were on our way to the art gallery (which was voted one of the best small art galleries in Europe! I was very impressed!) and we just happened to see the sign for free lunchtime concert. Thus friday was spent very relaxed, got a personal tour of the university, which looks a lot more like UBC. UBHAM has an actual campus feel, very big campus but very nice. The leaves are changing colors here because of autumn and it just portrayed the campus beautifully. We just enjoyed the day walking around and late afternoon, ofcoarse, we did some more studying. That evening we were supposed to go to a Mate's birthday party but Mike fell asleep around 9.30pm and so did his roommate (graduate students, eh?)...Looks like their partying days have past.

Saturday Mike had organized a bike ride for the two of us. I borrowed a friend's bike and we started biking from Selly Oak (Mike's neighborhood) to downtown Birmingham. Birmingham has more canals than Venice and one can follow the canals to pretty much anywhere they want to go. So we followed the canals into the city, met his cousin, Katie, age 20, at a pub for (early) drinks. From there we continued biking to a place called Aston Hall that I had looked up and wanted to go visit. Aston Hall used to be a country house built in the late 1700's by a sir Thomas (if I recall correctly--woops!) and the house was then built in the country but Birmingham has grown so much that its now more or less in the city. To get there was quite a trek because Mike's maps were from 1979!! HA! They show if you go up or down a hill (which is pointless b/c Birmingham is pretty much flat)--so,uhh, lets just say this was quite the adventure. We had a really good time though, getting lost, finding where we are, directions to get to Aston, and then realizing that 15 mins later we were lost again. We asked directions so many times but I don't know if we were too incompetent to follow them or if they were actually wrong...it took us a long time to get there.
When we got to the Aston grounds, we had our lunch and then proceeded into the building. Turns out that this weekend it was the last time open for two years due to major renovations they are going to perform to the hall!! I was thrilled I was able to make it in before it closed. It was very nice to walk around this old mansion, much bigger than I expected. Most of the mansion hasn't been restored, and thus a lot of the original furnishings and structures still remain in the house. The house has a lot of history; like a king who came to stay, cannonball that went through the front windows during WWI. Also, bit of general knowledge, the great hall (which was used for exercise when the weather was poor-who knew that people exercised in the 1700's?!) was a competition between other halls as to the length of the room. This one (see pictures) was one of the largest in the area.

After Aston Hall, we biked to Sutton Park, where Mike spent a lot of his childhood. His grandmother's house is just around the corner of this park, and thus it was great to see where he spent a lot of time. The park also has history to it. During the years of 1914 to 1920, the park was occupied by "her majesty's army" to recruit and train soldiers to prepare for war. Soldiers from as far away as New Zealand were trained in this huge 2000 acre park. Additionally, the original M4 built by the Romans runs through the center of this park. After our stop at the park, we visited Mike's uncle and aunt and his two cousins. Mike's grandmother was there as well, addition to another aunt and the same cousin i had met earlier in the day! So...it was quite the weekend; I feel like I had my share of boyfriend's family visit however in three weeks I'm going to see them all again including more family I havent met yet! Ahh! But, on the more realistic side, it was very pleasant, we had a lovely evening chatting over a few beers;it was the first time Mike had seen them in over a year. Our day ended with taking our bikes on the train back (couldnt be asked to bike the miles back) and we had a relaxed evening eating our home cooked stir fry infront of the 'telly' and watching English tv (just as crummy as anywhere else) and thus we restorted into starting watching 'the Dead poet's society' which we didnt finish because we were too tired.

I came back this morning by train & bus (distortion at Birmingham central station every sunday) and raced to the grocery store before they shut at 4pm for groceries for the week. I also picked up my new and very POWERFUL transformer so my speakers and hair straightener works again. I blew the last one because apparently my hair straightener can jump to more powerful voltage that is indicated on it and it couldnt be transformed in my 100w transformer...(supposedly). So in my MEC backback i had a 300 wat transformer (very heavy) and all my groceries while cycling up my street, which goes straight uphill...it was fabulous...

Tomorrow I've got lectures all day, so I best go to bed sometime soon. This evening I participated in my first ever Pub quiz (english tradition) where teams compete based on a series of questions in categories such as sports, general knowledge, songs, pictures, ect. and whoever has the highest score wins either prize money (our case every participant paid 1 pound-thus total collection of money was price=130 pound prize money) or some other prize. It was great fun for my first pub quiz, despite the fact that we didnt walk away any richer...to the contrary, I lost a pound!