Day 25: Day Trip to Chester with our programme leader~

Wow, wow, what a busy week.. 3 day trips + assignment + classes + housework.. finally have time to sit down and take a breather.. well, not exactly breather, cos i'm supposed to be studying for my Strategic Human Resource Management final now.. heehee...

So this trip was last Wednesday as I am typing this.. The whole course took off to Chester at 9.30am, occupying a total of 3 buses, or coaches as they call them here.. I say the whole course cos this trip was sponsored by our course leader (of course i'm sure the cost has been covered with our tuition fees. hehe) so nobody was going to pass up on a free trip to anywhere right.. The bus stalled while we were going trough toll, luckily the driver managed to restart the engine after awhile, if not.... :S

On the bus..

First we stopped at Cheshire Oaks, the designer village.. its called a village, not an outlet cos there are many many shops there with lots of bargains, including GAP, Nike, Burberry, Fred Perry, M&S, The North Face, Levis, etc etc etc... Many ppl went crazy there..

Shopping haven (if you have the cash/ credit~)

Since i didn't bring any normal (not long-sleeved/ too thick) clothes, and the weather is pretty hot lately, i decided to get a few cheap t-shirts.. the umbro one only cost 2.49 pounds, haha, its for kids aged 10-11 :D and Playboy bunny t-shirt for 5 pounds (pretty sure you cant get a playboy t-shirt for only rm30 in m'sia..) the gloves and sunglasses are for Switzerland, 2.99 each, reduced from 9.99.. Practicality rules!!

After some retail therapy, we continued our journey to Chester, after taking a group photo on the hill (i got kicked in the back by my friend who slipped, sobsob..), very awkward to take a photo on a sloping hill with abt a hundred and twenty ppl.. we had to walk a distance to Chester's tourist info centre to get everyone some maps..

On the way to the info centre

Tourist info centre~

After we got our maps, first thing we did was to have our lunch, which we had packed.. had lunch in front of the Chester Cathedral.. (kind of had my fill of cathedrals already, haha..)

I prefer Liverpool's anglican cathedral

What's more they charge an entrance fee, so we didn't go in.. haha..

Just took some pictures outside.. :)

Next up, we roamed the streets exploring the many shops.. Indulged in a fruit tart and danish between the 2 of us.. haha...

Dessert heaven

Saw this lady making interesting things called Welsh cakes.. haha, cheapskates didnt buy any, but managed to prise some info from this lady, she told us to pay a visit to the river, River Dee to be precise, she even gave us directions.. luckily we met her, if not we would have missed out on an important part of Chester.. Her exact answer when we asked her abt the must see attractions was "shopping, nah, you dont want to do that.. there's lots of roman stuff but thats kind of boring, so I would say go see the river.." hahahaha...

Next stop was the famous Eastgate Clock, second most photographed clock after Big Ben, if you can believe it.. haha..

View from below

Climbing up..

There.. 112 years old..

view of the street from under the clock..

Next stop:

This is supposedly the remains of a real roman amphitheatre where they held fights and tournaments and other shows..

Course, it doen't look that impressive now.. haha..

I climbed down into the pit just to take this picture k..

This is the north entrance as mentioned above.. :S

Then we set off to find the river..

Had to walk down a narrow, sloping road..

The view that greeted us.. very cloudy that day.. Notice how all the pics look rather grey, sigh...

Had to go on the very pretty bridge of course!

on Queen's Park bridge..


View from the bridge..

More me.. :S

They had a sign warning ppl not to jump from the bridge
seems i'm too short for that >.<

After enjoying the wind and the view, we then went to explore the park, actually we wanted to look for this:

but it started to rain and we gave up.. ended up seeing a lot of these instead:

Many many squirrels all running ard, so cute.. they weren't scared of us..

Since it was raining rather heavily and we had almost finished taking in all the sights, we decided to try out another something that is famous in Chester, hehehe..

This is really famous, not making excuses to have ice-cream..

Posing with the Honeycomb ice-cream that we shared.. Its rather expensive at 1.60 pounds, but really really good!! Just creamy and gooey enough, not too sweet and with little crunchy bits of honey.. Mmmmm...

I wld have liked to try out the other flavours too.. eg rum and raisin..

Then as we were getting rather bored of chester already, we decided t head back to the coach park early, but on the way there we passed a tiny little museum, called Grosvenor Museum, so went in to take a look.. Nothing much to see there..

Roman warrior

Abstract art exhibition..

and really cute stuffed toys..

Mostly just showed things from Chester's Roman past like bone fragments and bricks and coins, stuff like that.. so nothing much really.. So after going round, we continued our journey back to the coach park.. Along the way:

Thats the courthouse..

Met our course leader on the way, Mr Colin St Paul sitting rather forlornly at a bus stop cos he didnt have an umbrella, so we offered to shelter him back to the coach.. real nice guy, hehe..

So thats the end of the Chester trip, fell asleep on the bus on the way back, haha.. personally I preferred some of my other day trips more... Will post about Stonehenge and Whitby later..

View from the coach park..

Famous Chester old bridge..

Thats all for now.. :)