Bobba Adventures Pt. 2

This is a photo-filled post about my day of nature and art with Bobba!

We started out our day by heading to Harlow Carr, a very big public garden. We decided to tackle one half of the gardens first before lunch. As usual, I was on the lookout for cute animals to photograph. But I didn't have much luck until...A GIANT BEAR ATTACKED BOBBA.


Kind of. My most exciting find was, in fact, a slug.

Cool looking slug, right? Mostly I was just excited to use my camera's close-up mode allll over the place. And I sure did. I think I have about 20 flower pictures, but I'll just post my two favorites:

Marigold!

And...something else.

We made our way up to the greenhouse and looked around. On our way out, I noticed that they had a bunch of troughs full of miniature plant worlds. What a sight to behold. I spent probably a little too much time in this part of the gardens, to the point that even my Bobba seemed a little bored. This was my favorite tiny world:

We went for lunch at Betty's (a famous tourist spot in Harrogate, apparently) which of course included tea. It was very good! I met a couple of Bobba's lady friends who happened to also be there for lunch that day. Evidently (that's a Bobba word) I was friends with one of their grandsons when I came over when I was about 7.

After walking around more of the gardens, we decided to check out the little art show they were having. I was planning on just looking, but there were a couple of artists I actually really liked, so I bought some little prints of their paintings to put up on my wall. There was one painting that I aaaabsolutely fell in love with (http://www.nikkycorker.com/originals.php?page=picture_details&pid=320) but it was only available as the original painting, which cost £400. I don't know why I love it so much, but I really do. Hopefully it comes out as a print sometime.

We had some time to kill after Harlow Carr, so we drove into "downtown" Harrogate so Bobba could give me a little tour. One of the stops was the free art museum. What I really love about England is that artists here truly appreciate animals. Here were my favorite pieces of animal art:

Papier mache chicken.

I really appreciate the way this artist utilizes the small mouse figures in eggs to evoke a tone of chicks.

This work was simply entitled, "Bob." Forreal forreal.

Some of the artists took themselves a liiiittle too seriously, perhaps...

"Landscape as a visual metaphor to express ideas, memories and emotions." I am definitely using that the next time I have Malibuuuu! And possibly as a topic for one of my lit essays. Jk, literature is legit.

I did manage to find a couple of paintings that I liked that did not involve animals:

I especially like the second one because it's not actually a painting, it's a paper cutting. And it reminds me of Persepolis.

After the museum, we went to Bobba's friend's flat for...tea! So much tea. And so many little cakes.

So, an unexpected day full of art. I figure if I'm spending a month in Europe, I should probably have one of those. Can't wait to hang up my little prints! Which, by the way, are all colorful interpretations...of sheep.