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