We got the full aircraft type safety drill....
I swear his eyes watered....
The city is a nightmare...
Hi all, Brumcon round two...
I get to the bus after a while and wait until all the paid upfront passengers get on...then they work out how many seats they need at Golders Green so as they can allocate the remaining seats to us lot...
Finally the guy calls me over, looks at my ticket and says I could have gone straight on to the bus as the ticket was an upfront one...grrr
We got the full aircraft type safety drill and got told the bog was of the latest aicraft type...it was rancid, they hadn`t emptied it from the day before and so it stunk out the back of the bus...
We got to get off the bus at Milton Keynes to be told to go back to our seats for a head count...grrr...I had already got off and had to go all the way to near the back of the coach...we got headcounted and were allowed off for ten minutes.
We all get back on and the driver then does another headcount and just as he nears the end of the bus a South African guy says he might of miscounted as there could be someone in the loo....the driver thinks of this for a couple of seconds and knocks on the door....no answer so he opens he door just as he was taking a new breath to say something and the stench hit him,
I swear his eyes watered....he certainly wobbled :-)
Bbbbasss..sods they didn`t empty it....thats it! I am going to create a stink over this..Oh damn...sorry...I mean this isn`t the first time it`s happened and I have complained before, etc, etc, all the way to the front of the bus and then realises he has forgotton how far he got with the head count and does it all over again.
3 hours later I end up in Birmingham Digbeth coach station the very same one that was there when I was a young teenager....yeah I know, that was a couple of centurys ago :-)
There was a landmark to reference from....a pub from the old days that I used to play with a few bands in, called the "Barrel Organ" but is now some sort of irish theme pub but...at least is still having bands performing there.
The city is a nightmare...there`s this weird bug eyed carpark that looks like freeclimbers dream challenge....BugEye
and then there is this massive shopping mall with direction maps all over the place that only tell you the way to specific shops with no "you are here" type arrows, also none of the roads seem to exist in the same place, fuqin madness....
After pestering loadsa people for directions (thanks) I finally get to the "Britannia Hotel" I was amazed at, even though in a strange accent, that everyone seemed to speak English....unlike back in London.....
The meeting started around 1:00 pm and I got there about 4:30pm....
End of Part Two
The "BugEye" building in the Bull Ring is actually Selfridges department store clad in 15,000 aluminium discs.
http://www.birminghamuk.com/bullring.htm
Hmmm, maybe it is Selfridges, but it still says Car Park above the entrance :-)
Hey Rat, glad you made it - even if you did miss my talk your enlightening comments during the lockpicking lecture made up for it. Just calling in to say keep up the good work and lay off Brum.
omg... 3.30 hours late... damn...
More photos of the Bugeye in the Bullring in Pogus Caesar's new exhibition FROM JAMAICA ROW - REBIRTH OF THE BULLRING on display at OOM Gallery UK.
'Weekly throughout 2000 and 2003 Caesar visited the site of the Bullring, Birmingham and documented the building process. The images in the exhibition were selected from well over 200 photographs, they reveal the amazing transformation as the Bullring reverts from rubble and the 21st century version rises in it's place'.
In my opinion this exhibition is a good educational resource for people like me. (Best photo is the plaster bull with a broken leg!)
Regarding the exhibition From Jamaica Row Rebirth of the Bull Ring, thats a great piece of archive photography by Pogus Caesar. Three years of the Bull Ring, would love to see more of his images as I Caesar's got some images hidden away. I think the idea of revealing the past histories of Birmingham is novel. (Just one point about the Bull Ring structure, theres a lot of wasted space)