Weekend Away

Today I came back from a weekend away to Birmingham where I saw Michael Buble in concert on Friday evening at the LG Arena and Westlife last night. Both were great shows and I managed to take some pictures, but due to where we were sitting - it was me and my mum - and the lights, some of them aren't that good, but I still have the memories.

We (me, mum and mum's partner) went up during the day on Friday and we stayed in the Premier Inn. We had a few hours after getting there to relax and unpack and then we made our way to the Arena. We followed the rest of the croud walking towards the Arena, but ended up walking for about a mile before getting to the right place and then found out the block of seats we were in were over the other side! so we had to walk even further.

The support act were called Naturally 7, a New York group who use 'Vocal Play'. They use their voices as instruments and if you looked away you couldn't guess that they didn't have music. They were excellent.

Michael came on about 5 minutes after the support finished and was really good. He didn't have a break and performed for 2 hours non stop. He sang his new single, Just haven't met you yet, as well as old favourites and halfway through the show walked through the crowd to a smaller stage in the middle of the arena where he sang a couple of songs and shook the hands of fans reaching out. All in all the show was really good and well worth going to.

On Saturday we didn't have a concert to go to, so during the day we went shopping in Solihull. I've never been to Birmingham before and we were going to go to the Bullring - a shopping centre I've heard about - but it turned out that it was over the other side of Birmingham to us, so we decided to stay closer to home. For my birthday I got a few giftcards, especially for Waterstones as people know I love to read, so I took them with me and ended up getting a book called 'If I stay' and a card which has a really cool hippy pattern on it. I'm either going to frame it, along with a card of a campervan I got for my birthday, or just blu tack it to the wall.

Yesterday during the day we went to Stratford upon Avon and we saw the birthplace of William Shakespeare and the site of the house he lived in before he died. Some of the buildings were how they were all those years ago and looked really historical. It was a nice day for walking around and we had ice creams whilst sitting near a park and watched a group of swans in the canal. They had boat races and what looked like a festival on the other side, so after wandering round and having a look at what was going on, we got a small 50p boat back across the water and made our way back to the car.

Last night we went to see Westlife at the same arena and found out that we were on the opposite side of the arena to Friday. We were further away from the stage as we were on an angle to the stage, but we weren't as far up as last time. For the support they had an American singing / dancing group whose name I don't actually know as they weren't really introduced and when they said their name the music was too loud and drowned them out! Afterwards they had another support group called Wonderland who were created by Louis Walsh and Kian from Westlife and one of the members is his wife, Jodi Albert. They sang 5 songs and were ok, but I didn't really rate them.

Westlife came on at 9pm, after an hour and a half of waiting! and sang a mixture of new and old songs and did a medley of Halo, Sex on Fire and Boys are back in town in the middle of the set. The lights and effects were really good and my throat was tingling towards the end from singing every song - I was surprised I remembered some of the old ones! Their encore included the song they wrote for Kian and Nicky's dads who sadly passed away within a few weeks of each other and my favourite, You raise me up. I bought a programme which has a hologram on the front - probably why it was so expensive - but I didn't get anything else as it makes it an expensive trip.

The pictures of the programme I took have got a white stripe on them which was the flash on the camera, but you get to see what it looks like anyway!

After writing this post and importing and loading all the pictures, I've decided never to do one like this again as it's taken about an hour - with a break for tea - to do and has really got on my nerves with the pictures moving around where I don't want them! Now that I've written up my weekend, I've now got to go and write in my handwritten diary as I need to catch up.

Until next time.....