Painting a Broader Picture of Manchester

Manchester Picture

So, I'm on a train headed back to Manchester after an impulsive day trip to York, England (about 2 hours Northeast). Since I have time to kill and working laptop, I thought it seemed proper to try to paint a more complete picture of Greater Manchester. Now that the initial shock has worn off, the city is beginning to look like any other you would live in, and maybe I can effectively relay some of the pictures by way of words.

I was reminded that this blog could be made funny after stumbling on a copy of Bill Bryson’s excellent “Notes from a Small Island.” It’s a brilliant read and I hope all of you will give it or another Bryson book a good read soon.

But let’s talk about Manchester for a bit. Without meaning disrespect, I should say that Manchester is possibly the filthiest city I have ever been in. Mancunians have a general disdain for garbage cans. However, the cans themselves are in pretty short supply, so you might surmise that the city governors know that the public would just turn them into projectiles and just saves the middle step in the process. But regardless, a Manchester street can offer anything you might normally find in a rubbish bin, plus a little bit more.

In a related note, Manchester men seem to set a certain standard on a proper night of drinking. Basically, if you haven’t thrown up yet, you are still sober. Throwing up is the official beginning of “the buzz” and then the inability to speak English constitutes “drunk.” Mancunian English already requires a certain level of concentration, and a drunk Mancunian might as well be reading Polish backwards. You have to look for the glimmer in their eye and cock-neyed smile to determine if the strange assortment of consonants, vowels and various made up letters form a friendly "how do you do" or an invitation for a brawl.

The added effect of random hordes of drunk Mancunians wandering the streets is their ability to find bathrooms. Well, to be clear they don’t find bathrooms as much as create them, usually in doorways of some of the finer buildings in town. Doorways here seem to be created as either 1 or 2 person loo’s.

So, let’s be clear that the constant rain in Manchester is quite a blessing. If we lived in Tucson the town would smell like the deep recessess of a neglected pig farm. So the rain does a suitable job of washing the waste into the street, But a general rule of thumb is never step in a puddle in Manchester. You have been warned.

But, that’s not to say the city doesn’t have its charm. Like I said before, we’re talking about 80,000 students or something in a town of 500.000, so there’s a pretty heavy college tilt. But you can escape about a mile north and a few miles south to more yuppie areas of town that freakishly resemble Belltown and Fremont respectively.

The primary difference in the bar scene is that it pretty much runs Monday – Saturday, with Sunday being reserved for pubs and football. Every night the short skirt brigade is out in full force. Ironically, as girls are allowed to walk into bars nearly naked, on weekends almost every bar has strict dress codes for men. No tennis shoes of any kind, jeans are discouraged at the good clubs and at one particularly posh lounge we were advised we needed to “dress smarter” if we wanted to enter. I suspect he did not mean we should go buy oxford polos and horn rimmed glasses, so I need to figure out exactly what “smarter” means in terms of wardrobe.

But, I respect that bar. Optimistically, it appears to be a place where guys wait to throw up until after returning home, or possibly not at all. If I owned a bar, I’d probably want to have some pretty tight controls on which Mancunians I was willing to risk my liquor license on. So this week we need to go get some “smarter” clothes.

If you look at the Google map and type in M15 6PB, find Oxford Street and just consider that the vertebrae of the city. Everything falls off of that. The whole city seems to be on a triangle grid system, which makes navigation tricky. For example, near our house Deansgate is about a 5 minute walk from Oxford. But then a little further north, Deansgate intersects with Oxford. Plus, they like to change street names in mid stream, which is generally ok since street signs are either completely hidden or placed on the 45^th floor of the building closest to the corner, so you rarely know where you are anyway.

But I digress. Follow Oxford North, when it turns into St Peters. At Deansgate, St Peters turns into Quay (pronounced key). At Deansgate and St Peters, a left turns sends you to a younger set up yuppie bars and a right turn sends you to the older set of yuppie bars. But if you only follow Oxford as far as Portland and hang a right, you reach the southern edge of the main shopping district. Then you can head left and get the full Arndale Center experience – a combination of outdoor and indoor malls that threatens to tire out even the most ardent American woman.

(Side note – I may not be very smart. But I’m on a train and was facing forward the 1^st half of the 2 hour trip home. I haven’t changed seats, but now I’m facing backwards. Someone explain to me what happened, because I know my stop is the next one.)

But like I said, the town is not without charm. Head outside of the city centre and you see the rows of English houses made famous by BBC documentaries. There are still English pubs on every street corner and and people and their goofy accents still make me smile.

And later, I'll write about my Sunday afternoon jaunt to York, and post some pictures. York couldn't have been lovelier even if the whole city had a giant red bow on top of it. That post is next, so stay tuned.