1st day of spring break
today was wendy’s first day of spring break, so we had a sort of inauguration day for it. last night we stayed up as late as we could watching the NCAA basketball tournament, but of course we fell asleep before the exciting ending of the Kansas State/Xavier game. then while zeke went off to a meeting with a local photographer wendy enjoyed not having class by sleeping in and having coffee and a gilmore girls episode. then we met up with a couple from church, rich and abi, at a cafe for lunch. we had lots of fun chatting with them. they’re getting married in may and are a really cute couple. the cafe, which is inside a bookstore called blackwells, is the source of the weird bathroom story posted earlier today.
after that we headed downtown to pick up a few things. on the way we passed the big central library downtown that will be closing until 2013 for renovations, so we figured we should go in now to check it out.
the center rotunda has a big ocular skylight with a quote about wisdom encircling it.
you can tell zeke was really riveted by the architecture…
after that we passed the manchester town hall which contains murals by ford madox brown, a 19th century painter that actually lived in our neighbourhood, that wendy recently researched for class. we had heard it was hard to get access to the murals, but we thought we’d try and lucky enough they let us right in (although no pictures allowed). almost every square inch of that building is decorated and embellished.
here is the ceiling in the foyer. i love the unicorn with the lizard tongue.
also in the foyer was this statue of james joule (named after him: the joule= unit of energy). apparently he was from manchester. but i thought the statue was funny because from this angle it kind of just looks like he’s bored playing on an iphone.
i took tons of pictures in the town hall, so i’ll post a separate slide show. we enjoyed getting to see the murals, which depict the history of manchester. it was fun to tell zeke the stories about the artist that i had recently read in the biography written on him by his grandson.
after this we finally headed toward the shopping area to get the stuff we needed.
wendy is obsessed with these magical dish gloves called gloveables. (they’re basically thick rubber dish gloves with really cute patterns and ruffles.) the cute cherry pair she had finally wore a hole and we needed to replace them. of course the only place we can find them is the super posh department store harvey nichols. so that was a fun little trip. we picked out a new pink pair and stopped for coffee and cupcakes in the cafe. zeke was excited about his cupcake flavour, called “banoffee”- banana and toffee.
this is the view from the cafe’s floor length windows.
after picking up a few groceries and dry cleaning we headed home to have american tv night with our friend katherine followed by what i’m sure will be a late night of basketball.
it’s been a great start to wendy’s 3 week spring break!
