Newcastle day 3

I had a rather busy day yesterday.

I switched rooms yesterday without any problems. I'm a floor lower, so less stairs. Yay! That may sound a bit silly, but with my first room I had to go down a set of stairs just to get to the bathroom. Slightly tricky in the middle of the night when you're half asleep!

I was chatting with a boy from Adelaide in the tv room while I was waiting for my room to be ready. (He cheers for Port, so was happy that Adelaide lost to the Eagles!) He mentioned that there was a music festival happening in Newcastle that day. It sounded interesting, so I got online to find out the line-up. I'm glad I checked to see who was performing before I bought a ticket. The headliners were a band called The Streets - they did a song called 'You're fit, but don't you know it'. I can hear Lachlan groaning! The Streets are a group of white guys from Birmingham that attempt to do rap. That certainly made my decision for me, there was no way I was going! It also explained why the hostel was filled with young punk/pop wannabes. Bleh.

One I'd left the hostel my first stop was the Discovery Museum. It is a museum on the history of Newcastle. It was quite interesting watching the changing history of Newcastle over the last several hundred years. Much of the museum was aimed at kids, but there was enough information for it to be enjoyable for adults. Unsurprisingly there was quite a bit of information regarding the coal mines in Newcastle. They even had some of the tools that were used in the mines at the start of the 1900s. I took photos, of course.

After the Discovery Museum I headed to Blackfriars, which was once a medieval structure, but now only the foundations remain. It has been turned into a rather nice park area.

Right behind Blackfriars is Chinatown. Chinatown really only consists of one street - Stowell Street. It was nice wandering along Stowell St looking at all the Chinese restaurants. It's amazing that in the heart of Newcastle you suddenly come across one street that has Chinese lanterns hanging from each building, and the buildings are all brightly coloured, and then at the end of the street it just goes back to normal Newcastle.

There is a Chinese arch at the end of the street that is pretty impressive. What I found interesting is that when you look up the hill, through the arch, the Newcastle United football ground is perfectly framed. It certainly says a lot about the diversity of the city.

My next stop was the Blue Carpet, which is in front of the Laing Art Gallery. I hadn't noticed it when I was first at the Laing Gallery so I thought I'd better stop back and have a look. In the area in front of the Laing Gallery the ground is covered in large slabs of concrete with lots of blue glass sprinkled along the surface. During the day you wouldn't notice it unless you were looking for it, but at night under the street lights it probably glows and actually looks like a blue carpet.

After the Blue Carpet I did the long trek out to the Seven Stories museum and the Biscuit Factory.

The Seven Stories bills itself as a museum of the history of children's literature. Unfortunately it doesn't live up to its expectations. It isn't really a museum, it's more of a kids discovery area. While that is great and it's important that kids are interested in reading, there isn't much to appeal to adults. I was quite disappointed. There was an exhibit dedicated to the work of Roald Dahl which was quite interesting and I spent a bit of time in there. There was also a room where the museum said they had original children's book manuscripts. It turned out that they had a couple of pages of manuscripts that were hidden behind doors that you had to open to 'discover' what was hidden behind. I decided to stop in at the bookshop at the end and they had a collection of Classic Children's Books. I don't know how 'Classic' you could call them - they didn't even have The Magic Far Away Tree or a collection of classic fairytales.

Overall I was exceedingly disappointed. I think a museum displaying the history of children's literature would be very interesting and is sadly lacking from any museums.

My last stop for the day was The Biscuit Factory. The Biscuit Factory is a museum/art gallery that is housed in a converted biscuit factory - who would have thought!

It was a lovely art gallery with a great selection of glass work and paintings. The best bit of course is that everything is for sale! I didn't buy anything, mainly because most of it was slightly outside of my budget, but I was tempted by a lot of it. Something that was rather silly that I spotted was a series of framed pictures of a cartoon elephant called Dennis. Each shot was a different portrayal of Dennis heading somewhere. The one I found really cute was a shot of Dennis with a toy bucket and shovel clutched in his trunk heading off 'to see the paleantologist'. It was so sweet.

When I got back to the hostel I was making myself some dinner when the kitchen and tv area was invaded by 17/18 year old German tourists. There seems to be a whole group of them in the hostel at the moment. All I can say is that they are little shits! Even though only a couple of them were cooking the whole group of 15 or 20 of them had to be in the kitchen at the same time. Makes it slightly tricky when you're trying to cook as well.

I know, I know. I'm being intolerant, but my peace and quiet was so very rudely shattered.

Anyway, enough of that. I'm about to head out now. Lots to do today.