bigmacbear | England Trip, Part II

Thursday, August 14
We arrived in Manchester about 7 AM on Thursday. We cleared passport control rather easily (apart from the officer wanting to make sure

gmjambear wasn't there to produce a TV show as that is his profession) and went through the "nothing to declare" channel after picking up our bags. Our friend Tim met us at the airport and we followed him to the train station and boarded a train for central Manchester. Once we arrived at the station, we caught a cab to Tim's apartment (or "flat") and settled in for a nap to ward off jet-lag.

Thursday evening I called my father in Cincinnati as it was his birthday. No sooner had I gotten off the phone than we switched on the news and found out we'd just missed the blackout that affected New York (statewide), Ontario, and parts of Pennsylvania, Ohio, and Michigan (among others). As it happened, Cincinnati was not hit, so it didn't come up in conversation.

We went out for the first of several evenings sitting by the canal in "the village" in downtown Manchester. Tim pointed out the local AIDS memorial, officially titled "The Beacon of Hope" but Tim called it "The Chimney of Despair". ;-) It's a sculpture, apparently made of some sort of ductwork oriented vertically, and perforated so the light inside can shine through the holes.

There are also some signs in the area which have been creatively altered (or at least attempted): "Canal Street" looks like it once read "Anal Treat" but has been fixed and re-altered so it now reads "Anal Street", and the sign for the "Automatic Bollards" which close the street to vehicles during the evening hours looks like someone tried to alter it to read "Automatic Bollocks" instead.

We made a short evening of it and planned to do most of our Manchester sightseeing the following day.

Friday, August 15th
The day's sightseeing began with a visit to the Manchester Art Gallery. There were a couple of works on display specifically for Europride 2003, and someone was supposed to lecture on those at 1:30 in the afternoon. On finding the two individual works in question I was glad we decided not to wait for the lecture. We paid a visit to the town hall and the library, and walked over to the Greater Manchester Exhibition Centre, or "G-Mex" for short (sounds like the name of a rap star from Mexico to me ;-). This was at one time a major train station which fell into disuse and was extensively remodeled.

We had lunch of cheese and pate at a spot by the canal, and caught the tram to Salford Quays, to visit some very striking-looking buildings there: The Lowry and the Imperial War Museum North. The Lowry is a conglomeration of theaters, galleries, restaurants, and what not; the major gallery there is pretty much dedicated to the works of a local artist named L.S. Lowry, for whom the whole complex is named. The Imperial War Museum North, across one of the quays, is also architecturally impressive but the exhibits within proved much more interesting. They did a light and sound show on the walls of the exhibit space, using many projectors to cover all the angles.

We took the tram back into town for dinner, then had a drink or two on Canal Street and headed home for an early night, as we would need to catch an early train for London in the morning.