Exploring Middlesbrough / Bonfire Night

Last Saturday Miark took the bus and went shopping in Middlesbrough, which is about 6 miles from where I live. It has an actual shopping mall with shops both indoors and outdoors. We did a fair bit of shopping, buying a present or two for people back home as well as a Kinder Egg and a Willy Wonka bar (which is an extremely addictive very good chocolate bar) which we had search several stores before finding.

As for the Kinder Egg, they are about the size of real eggs and they are a thin chocolate shell (milk chocolate on the outside, white chocolate on the inside) with a plastic egg inside that contains some sort of small toy. A couple weeks ago Leigh found a keychain in a Kinder Egg that I really liked and really wanted so I have been on a mission to find a Kinder Egg with that toy in it. That would be easy if there was a series of 4 or 5 different toys in the eggs, but there’s not. I have 11 toys now (from 11 separate Kinder Eggs) and I have not yet gotten a repeat toy yet. So I have been buying Kinder Eggs (they are quite inexpensive) every time I pop by a store that has them and am determined to find the toy that I seek.

Miark and I finished up our shopping and stopped by a bakery to grab a snack before heading into Stockton Town Center to do a little more shopping before going to meet Roger, Claire, Mini, and Patrick to watch the fireworks over the river. The fireworks were pretty impressive, and while it wasn’t for very long there was a lot of variety so it was entertaining to watch. There was music playing at the same time but the fireworks weren’t coreographed to the music so it felt a little scattered that way. Mini and I found a way to fix that and discovered that listening to music from his Ipod Mini improved the firework show considerably. After that all that was left to do was friends, food, and of course, the nearest local pub.