Man City this Sunday

So, people keep asking when I'll get to a football match, and the answer is this Sunday. Manchester City vs Everton. It's comparable to Mets or White Sox (Man City) vs Tampa Bay or Kansas City. Not exactly a barnburner, but it should be a blast either way.

Manchester City is really the local's team, and Man United is the rich people and tourist club. It's like being given the choice to root for your hometown boys or being a Yankee fan because they have Alex Rodriguez. I may get to a United game just for the fun of it, but being a sports masochist, I of course have to follow the lesser team.

Some links are to the side if you feel the desire to learn a little about the world's most popular sports league.

Unrelated....I don't know if I'm a genius for figuring it out or an idiot for it taking me so long, but I figured out how to listen to some US radio in the greatest pennant race in the last 10 years. I can grab the KJR stream off the internet, record it using Replay Music and then stick it on my ipod. So I'm recording the morning show now, which I'll listen to tomorrow morning, which is really not that long from now. Also, god bless all the American companies like espn.com that utilize Podcasting. Pretty clever if you ask me. Download the news and take it with you. Media companies take note - you should do this because you can stick ads in teh middle and people are too busy walking to skip through them.

Look for a football match report and pics later this weekend. Cheers.

Some cultural differences

So, one of the more interesting aspects of the trip is learning the different norms and mores of each natioanlity. For example, you may remember an earlier post in which I felt bad about the fact that the French girl didn't have a place to live. So it turns out she's Moroccan and her 7 year boyfriend is moroccan as well. She found another place to live with a Canadian guy, but the Moroccan boyfriend "wouldn't let her" move in with the other guy.

As an American, this seemed quite shocking. First of all, what nerve to tell your girfriend she has to live in a crappy dorm instead of getting a flat. Secondly, knock Morocco off my list of places I want to visit. Granted it's a sample size of one, but Moroccans seem to be possessive and psychotic. I can imagine myself in Morocco, walking into a bar, asking a girl for directions and getting a bottle broken over my head by some ridiculous, jealous hothead.

On the flip side of that experience was an hour long conversation I had with a Pakistani guy. He laughed about the Indian-Pakistani conflict, explaining that he has many Indian friends and the people get along fine. It's the government fighting over Kasmir, but in reality most Pakistanis and Indians bear no ill will toward each other. he went as far as to say the governments actually fuel the extremeist groups who cause the conflicts, but the ordinariy citizen is indifferent. It's also interesting to hear how many large American companies - including Proctor and Gamble - have offices in Pakistan. Not something you would ordinarily think about. He did mention that the American heads of these corporations need bodyguards - again not from ordinary Pakistanis, but from the extremists.

And one final thing about English. We have a class in Entrepreneurship that involves a group project. The class is about 4 Exec, 8 exchange and 8 full-time students. We were supposed to "network around" the class and find groups, but damn if the English full-time students hadn't already teamed themselves up ahead of time. What a bunch of jokers.

Editors Concert

Hey, I might have this blogging thing figured out, but I still haven't mastered the pictures. So just click on the shutterfly link on the right if you want to see some photos.

Ok, so I think the Editors are getting some airplay in the states, but they're blowing up out here. I'm sure they'll be on every summerpalooza tour next year, so keep an eye on them.

We saw the show at a Manchester music venue called Manchester Academy. It's like a smaller version of the Showbox, the kind of place where if a fire starts we'd all die from being trampled to death but no one would die from the smoke. Because honestly, you put 700 Brits in a closed space and you're damn near death from the smoke inhilation anyway. Cigarettes here are 5 pounds 50 a pack, which is about $10.00 U.S. and they still smoke them like there's a never ending supply sitting in the cupboard. Just proves that a sin tax doesn't curb behavior but just drains the pocketbook of those who partake.

Anyway, it was classic Manchester show - unbelievably loud, packed to the rafters, filled with crowd surfing kids and 45 year old Mancunians standing in the back. Since a rock show isn't really that unique and the Editors are someone you have probably heard of, AND since it's really not that different than a U.S. show, I'll just cut this short. I guess the only thing I found funny was that they wouldn't give you unopened beer cans because they were afraid they'd be thrown on the stage. But they would open the can for you and let you take them back into the audience. I suppose the theory is that - well I can't even begin to figure out a theory for that one. But yes, some people did choose to spend their 2 quid on spraying the crowd with their beer later. Go figure.

A few picks up on shutterfly. Talk to you later.

New Pics

I got the pics working up on Shutterfly. You'll probably have to give them your email address and set up an account, but it's about 3000% better than flickr. New pics up now.
http://mancunianhusky.shutterfly.com/action/

Just a Few Thoughts

I can't tell if it's Blogger or the crackpots running the MBS IT department, but my blogging abilities are severely impaired these days. Knowing what I do about the Brits, I'm not putting any blame on our friends down at Google. (I suppose it could be me, but c'mon...)

A few thoughts that may or may not be interesting:

1) I've still yet to find anyone in Britain that's even the slightest bit helpful. All polite, but absolutely no action items come from any conversation. Every conversation ends with a Brit looking at you with a blank stare waiting for you to leave empty-handed.

2) Yahoo bought Flickr a while back and absolutely killed it. It's obvious they replaced the great Product Managers they had with Textbook memorizing Ivy League MBA's who have never heard the term "Customer Experience." I'll be moving the pictures to shutterfly soon.

3) The bus system in Manchester is all privatizied. It's crazy. 7 different bus companies all competeing on the same and different routes, on different schedules and different rates. Totally nuts.

4) I figured out how to cross the street on foot. The secret is that intersections are for cars, and pedestrians cross wherever they can. So if you see an opening, look both ways and run, no matter where you are.

5) The weather here is nuts. It's like Seattle where you get sun, rain, cold and warm, but in Seattle weather shifts through those options over a few days while in Manchester they change in an hour. Literally, you can be sitting in shorts and a t-shirt after a pleasant sun-filled stroll, and see someone walk in drenched and shivering after getting caught in a hail storm. It's that unpredictable.

6) A few more pics are up on Flickr for the time being. Hope to be moved over to shutterfly tomorrow.

Hope all is well.

One Week,

Howdy everyone from lovely Manchester. I had envisioned myself posting every day, but that has proved to be impossible. So, hopefully I can recap Mancunian life on at least a weekly or bi-weekly basis.

Let's start with the arrival. I left Seattle at 11:00am Saturday and landed in Manchester Sunday at 8:00am. Since I slept a little on the plane, I really felt that my body and mind adjusted on the spot (though we'll see in later posts that my brain was obviously not at its peak.)

I'm going to try to help you out by listing the post codes of the places I'm talking about. If you use http://maps.google.com you can ride along with me and it may make things make more sense.

I jumped on a train from the airport (M90 1QX), and 10 minutes later hit Picadilly Station (M60 7RA). My honest to god first thought of Mancehster was, "How horrible. This can't be Manchester. What did I just commit to?" I had heard that the University of Manchester was walking distance from the train station, so I lugged my bags around for a while in a mindless search for the Business School's in-house hotel. But, this is when I realized I didn't really know the address of the hotel, and I finally ended up at another hotel (M1 3BB) where I was able to catch a cab home to the Biz School, which is place I should have just cabbed to in the first place (m15 6pb).

This was actually the first instance of a continuing trend of peculiar English behavior. They are simultaneously exceedingly polite and utterly unhelpful. You get a lot of, "Why love, that's an excellent point and I really wish I could help ya but I can't. I really hope you enjoy your stay in manchester tho."

Anyway, on to something actually halfway interesting. Manchester Business School (MBS) has its own hotel, which is odd but cool. But it also had a computer lab which was exceedingly helpful. The added benefit was that all us homeless exchange students could use it. It didn't take a real genius to figure out that everyone else in there was an exchange student, so in the course of about 5 minutes from checking in, I had a solid base of 5 or 6 equally confused friends, mostly from France and Canada.

The rest of Sunday was spent walking all over Manchester and setting up some methods of communication - namely a mobile. And just for the record - wandering around England is not as easy as it sounds. Every intersection you take your life into your hands. Cars actually speed up if they see you in the road and it's like walking in a mirror trying to figure out who will be taking a left or right turn. Plus all of the streets are marked with white lines, regardless of whether they're 1 or 2 way. So the first day I usually just stood on the corner waiting for someone else to cross and followed them. Jaywalking is not only legal, it's encouraged. The walk / don't walk sign are green and red. Green means 'You're totally safe." Red means, "Screw it - go ahead and give it a shot."

I'll spare you the details of Monday's search for a flat, in which I had a place, didn't have a place, then ended up back in the place with different roommates and possibly being a jerk for not volunteering to give up my spot to a French girl. But hey, only the strong survive and desperate times call for desperate measures, and besides - I had already dropped 450 pounds ($800) on the place so I stayed strong. I lost a little sleep over it, or it may have been the jet lag keeping me awake, but it all worked out.

So I'm living with the coolest little French guys, Augustin and Guillaume. They are young kids but absolutely hilarious. They are also the cleanest guys I've ever met, which forces me to ratchet up my own cleanliness about 4000%. We're in a 2 BR place (M15DE) but it's cool because the French kids cook dinner and lunch almost every day. And they *like* to clean, so I just stay out of their way and try not to make a mess. I'll add some more pics soon.

The place is on the site of some old and historical Mancunian Rock Music Club from the 70's. Considering how much trouble most people are having finding a place, I was glad to get invited in by the French guy who found it. We're having tons of issues with British Telecom and can't get Internet access for some reason right now, so that's making it hard to post stuff online. Also, we have no tv, which totally sucks but I'm working on it.


(Side note: At our first dinner in the apartment I told Augustin and Guillaume I would look for a Pawn Shop and get a TV and DVD so we could at least watch some videos. They looked at me funny and so I asked if they had Pawn Shops in France. They sheepishly said they did but something still didn't seem right. That's when I figured out they thought I was telling my new roommates that I wanted to bring home some movies from the "Porn Shop." Anyway, we cleared that up.)

There are a few million pubs here, a few thousand bars and then another few hundred clubs. The key difference, as far as I can tell, is Pubs stay open until 11, Bars until 2, and Clubs until 4. And our new apartment is about 200 yards from a group of about 7-8 Bars called the "Deansgate Locks" which I'm sure will help with my studies.

I don't know what your stereotype of English women is, but mine is that they are old and doddy. However, the Manchester women have adopted Paris Hilton as their fashion icon, and try to copy her outfits. It doesn't matter how cold it is, they're wearing short skirts and taktops with heels. Not all of them, but enough to make even the Italian guy in the group say, "I have never seen so many women in all of my life."

Now that I'm settled with a place to live, we've been able to watch some football games on TV. Manchester City is basically the Cougs in blue kits, inventing new ways to lose heartbreaking matches. Also, this week we're hitting a Mancunian club to see The Editors. So, the pieces are starting to fall into place.

Well, I'm running long so I'll shorten things up to say the folks in the Exchange Program are a blast. Americans, French, Italians, Chinese, Indians, Bulgarians, Swedes and Candians and we all seem to get along well. I think US MBA students should be forced to go on an Exchange. It's unbelievable how much you have to open your eyes and learn about new companies just to survive. And you need to read world journals to be able to have a conversation with people from other countries, and not sound like an American Imperialist. Oh, and pretty much the entire world hates our current governemnt and administraion. It really is something to have so many cultures agree on one thing, and be able to speak intelligently on the subject.

I have a link to my Flickr account on the side of the page and I may use that for a photo album. The pics of the Exchange students are from an event we did this weekend - teambuilding stuff like building rafts, obstacle courses, business simulation, etc...

I'll be in touch soon. If you set up skype - and all of you should since it's a free telephone just by using a computer - my user name is aboyer08. Give me a call. And if you see a really weird number on your caller ID, it's probably me.

- Andy