Manchester – worth a visit?
I´m a huge England-fan and a John Newman-Fan. So when we found out that John Newman was going to give a concert in Manchester on my birthday , we decided we´d go for it, bought tickets and found ourselves an Airbnb-host.
(This is probably his best-known song)
So Saturday morning, me and Filip flew from Berlin Schönefeld airport, my personal favorite airport, to Manchester. There, Filip was held in customs for three hours and by some stroke of luck granted permission to enter the UK without the Visa he actually needed and should have applied for beforehand (AND paid 86 Pounds, around 120€ for). Somehow he hadn´t checked before, thinking that his Serbian passport would get him anywhere in the EU for a stay of maximum 6 months, which is the case anywhere apart from the UK, apparently. And apparently they then thought that THEY had made a mistake, stamped him a visa in his passport and let him go. On the train to the city center I already felt ten years older with all this stress and was weirdly reminded of my last trip to Sweden – and it didn´t end there: all of our Airbnb Guests for that day had pre-booked the drama card with their stay. One locked himself out with his plane departure being only two hours away, and the next one failed to open the door when buzzed in and ended up waiting three hours outside because he had also copied my phone number wrong – while Rieke was waiting upstairs for him wondering where on earth he had wandered off to.
Needless to say, I couldn´t really enjoy my Jamie Oliver meal of the day seabass mussel brokkoli potato dish even though it was delicious but Filip was heartwarmingly sweet and I was glad to doze off around half past seven for about ten hours and straight into the 25th year of my life.
The next day I was ready for a wander, though! After a long sleep-in, we started sauntering off into the roads singing random songs. My favorite part of Manchester turned actually out to be the tram rides. They were through narrow town streets and then up so you could see the the gleaming high buildings with old towers and stone houses interspersed from above, which was a very comfy way to discover the city.
Manchester is new and old at the same time, and small and big also at the same time. It has both huge old marble bank halls and old round library buildings but if you go two or three tram stops further you see huge weird modern houses (see below). The city center is super tiny with everything easily reachable in 10 minutes (which I found great!) but then the city around this inner circle extends quite far.
We went to Old Trafford, THE stadium of Manchester United, lurked around there for a bit and then decided it was nothing special to see and went to the Media City along the Harbor which is quite a sight if you are into new crazy modern architecture and water around it.
Imperial War Museum, designed by Daniel Libeskind
Some house that looks like it should have been the other way around
As you can see on the pictures, there´s not much to see. I was a little disappointed because the houses were too big and the streets too small and everything was just too new and soulless to me, but I´m just more of a sucker for little countryside cottages with rolling green fields in the background rather than wow it´s so modern- rediscovering herself and having so much cultural life to offer city.
Which it does. There are old and nice buildings, as I said, there´s a nice cathedral, and the library, and all museums are free admission. There´s gay village, the supposedly most liberal party strip in England. All this is probably cool. But not for me.
I still had a great time being in Britain after all, with my man, listening to Mancunian accents and buying everything British I could lay my hands on. Our Airbnb hosts were also quite a lucky draw, they were this incredibly hospitable Malayian couple who gave us a comfy bed which unfortunately didn´t have a door to the neighboring bathroom (which made me sit for a minute and appreciate the person who invented doors) but all in all it was great.
We both enjoyed the concert very much, only thanks to complete media coverage and family drawing the parallels, unwanted thoughts of Bataclan popped up in my head and I couldn´t help but worry at least a little about the safety, especially because door security had been a joke. It was a beautiful venue though, an old chapel, and it was a small and older than we thought audience (Filip had feared we´d end up wedged between screaming 15-year-olds). John Newman had brought his mommie and his brother, and he clearly enjoyed being on stage so much, so we couldn´t help but smile at each other and boogie along.
All in all, I really had a great time, even if Manchester wasn´t my cup of tea (pun intended). Maybe I didn´t give it enough time, though, it´s not like you can get a feel for a city in two days time – or can you? Don´t you always learn something new about a culture, broaden your horizont? Learn to appreciate tap water in Germany, or the sheer existence of doors? Or even it it´s just for a good old time of fun! Why not?
How to Budget Manchester
Don´t. It´s not cheap. This shouldn´t be a info box but a warning box – Great Britain is anything but cheap for Eurozoners, especially not if coming from Berlin. Nevertheless, budget airlines such as easyjet and ryanair fly there and curry places around chinatown get you fed for about 5 pounds (allegedly, we didn´t try and instead went to like the most expensive place ever, the Jamie Oliver thing, but for British it´s probably still normally prized) and trains run fast every ten minutes from the airport to the city center in only 20 Minutes. You can Airbnb but the cheaper options are on sofas in a living-room, or of course in a hostel dormitory.
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