Bristol+Banksy

This past Saturday Tess, Ally and I went to Bristol to go see some of Banksy's work and to check out what Bristol had to offer.

We were almost late for the bus, waking up 20 minutes before it was supposed to leave, but got there on time and dozed on and off for the 2.5 hour bus ride.

Bristol was a pretty urban city, I mean that it was much more urban than Oxford, a little gritter, more modern, much larger buildings. We went and got some pasties for lunch and found a map online of where some of Banksy's pieces were and went off to find them.

Oh, by the way, if you would like to read a little more on Banksy, HERE is a link to some more information about him. If you don't feel like reading it, he is basically a graffiti artist who travels all over the world making political statements through graffiti and different types of art installations. Here are the Banksy pieces we saw in Bristol (supposedly where he is from).

While these were really awesome, they were only a small part of all the awesome street art we saw. There were people actively painting, we added our names to a public art building that anyone could add to.

Then we saw a parade coming down the street with protesters from the community gathered together against the creation of a new Tesco (a wal-mart-esque corporation) because there were already two very close and they took away from small businesses. There was music and dancing and pictures being taken. It was really awesome to see people of all ages gathered together for this common cause.

Following this great hullabaloo we hurried off to see the Clifton Suspension Bridge (hurrying because we only had about an hour left of our three hours there). After swiftly walking, following signs, asking at least 5 different people for directions we turned a corner and found it.

It was pretty incredible. It spanned over this beautiful gorge, into which there was a path which we unfortunately did not have time to traverse.

After the bridge we had to hustle on back to the bus station. We made it with 15 minutes to spare and got on the bus to nurse our sore feet and doze on and off again back to Oxford.

Getting back, we decided we needed to rest, upload pictures and watch the Olympics. Which we did.