Saltaire Ab Fabula!

Well I know you have all been biting at the chomp to see these photos of Saltaire and Shipley!!!! And finally they are HERE!!! I also am dying to share my preliminary travel plans because EEEEEEEEEP it’s far too exciting to keep to myself  anyway on Saturday Yancy and I decided to live it large and splurge by going to Saltaire. Our train ticket – oh boy – was pretty expensive coming in at £2.20 return! It almost broke the bank let me tell you! We arrived in the morning and promptly tried to figure out first where the David Hockney museum is and then where the centre of Saltaire was. We walked for a long long looooooooooooong time… until we realized - because we saw a sign – that we were not in Saltaire anymore but actually in SHIPLEY! Yes we had walked to the next town without even realizing it!
We decided at this point that we should get some lunch or we might expire and found the Shipley market… it had this totally amazing escalator which we played on for awhile.



we also went to this really dreadfully depressing market



and discovered that Shipley is lucky enough to also have a weatherspoons (aka meat market from the night we went out with Hayley)



We decided then that we needed to leave Shipley and get back to Saltaire. So we began to walk. We encountered many lovely quaint English things along the way





PEACE DUDE!


a small red door for mom





and then we realized we had left Saltaire again… and found a sign welcoming us back in!



we presume that the second time we left we were in Bingley but didn’t see any evidence to prove our hypothesis.
Anyway eventually we got lost… we managed, yes, to get lost in one of the smallest towns in all of England! Here is the street we got lost on… very nice street though



‘where the hell are we!’



eventually we made it back to where we wanted to be… by this very wimpy bell!



and bought pasties for lunch at this bakery. By this point we were both a little knackered and in need of good ‘ol British nourishment! (I think pasty’s definitely are a British nourishing supplement!)



We then went to the museum and looked at the David Hockney opera sets, prints, drawings, and photo collages which are the best part. The gallery was in an old spinning mill but you would think it was a salt mill because in big red letters on the outside it said SALTS but that is because this guy named Salts founded Saltaire and the spinning mill… good for him! It would be cool to live in that place… it was the epitome of cool loft chic! But the gallery itself was rather strange… I wasn’t too impressed. It did have some really cool books and one on Leni Reinfenstahl who I can’t find anything on except a German film which I can’t watch because… it’s in German… (grrr) and other cool photographers but they were playing very straaaaaaaaaaaaange music.

After that we went to the train station and soaked up some sun



it was like being at the beach in the middle of the winter!
Hooray!!!! Or as we like to say… Goosey!!!

Here are pictures of the train station:



look at that blaaaaaaaaaazing sun!



When we got back to Leeds we went to my favourite place in the whole world, Morrisons (aka worst hell of a grocery store you could ever EVER encounter) and then went to Millennium square to watch ice skaters







and that’s the end of my saltaire/Shipley story! It was so exciting I know!

Anyway travel plans!!! This trip bonanza is commencing on march 25th…. Sometime in the morning or late morning I hope. Tanja my friend from York and I are travelling for 19 or so… errr … days together through west,central and eastern Europe. We are staring by taking the train to Newcastle-Upon-Tyne where we will catch a ferry to (you’ll never guess where….!!!)


NORWAY!!!!!!!!!!!!11 HOW WICKED IS THAT??? *&(^^$*&%)&^(*&^( TOTALLY WICKED!
We leave at 3pm from Newcastle and arrive in Kristiansand, Norway at 9.15am the next day. From there we are taking a train to Oslo, then to Gothenburg, Sweden. From there we are taking another train to Malmӧ(pronounced Malmooo (like a cow moos)) which is also in Sweden but directly links to Copenhagen in Denmark. There we are meeting my friend Becky who also studies at York (whoa small world!) (literally!!) and hanging out in Copenhagan for a day and going to a gallery just outside called ‘louisanna’.
That is the most planned part of the trip though the rest sort of goes like this: going into Germany from Denmark to Berlin and Dresden and maybe elsewhere not sure. Then to Prague, Czech Republic, Vienna in Austria, Budapest for sure and maybe Eger in Hungary then a long long long train ride down through Serbia and somewhere else to send up in ATHENS!!! This is the 19days part… we have 19 days to do all that (whoa!)
From there Tanja and I are going separate ways and I am taking a ferry from Athens to Bari in Italy. Oh and in Athens I’m hoping to see my friends Stan and Irene.
After Bari going to Rome and then taking a train up through Milan and into Switzerland to go by Vevey and Geneva (I want to get a rock from Lake Geneva!) and then into France. I had wanted to go to Barcelona super badly but don’t think I can so in france I hopefully will get to either Lyon or Bordeaux as well as Toulouse and then going home via paris and the channel tunnel which I took before to London and then back to Leeds. That last part I have 11 days for!!!

WOW WOW WOW!!!

So that’s my story folks! Write to meeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee
Love maeve xoxo