You feel a bit of a spare part those days before leaving, your sorting stuff so you feel like you can't get involved with anything new. You end up window shopping and buying things you don't really need - like Superdrug's 3 for 2 on cosmetics [as if America doesn't do make up] buying Glamour merely for the Nails Inc [picture 3], walked my way around the walls of York [picture 1] and poked the National Railway museum [picture 2].
On Friday I went to Hull for a change of scene. Hull a bit of a weird city and it's one few people go out of their way to visit. It always felt a city that's lacking that extra vibe to push itself [probably merely lacking government funding]. What Hull is good for is lots of free museums of which there are eight. Mostly they are based around the Old Town in the Museum Quarter where you'll find the slavery abolitionist William Wilberforce's house, the Street life Museum [picture 4] and the Hull and East Yorkshire museum. If you ever need to pass an afternoon in Hull i'd really recommend them.
When I try to picture Detroit I always imagine it to be something similar to Hull - both were previous industrial hubs that have seemed to have lost their spark when their manufacturing lifeblood drained away. Nevertheless I don't know what to expect, I tend to ignore the looks and misunderstanding about why you'd want to move to Detroit but I tend to try and see over people's generalisations, people often become too believing of them without experiencing the place themselves. Here's to giving it a go.