The Bartos Visit Manchester
We got our first official visitors! Our friends Melissa and Brent Barto, who are on a European tour traveling and working at B&Bs, decided to swing into town to check out Manchester and Liverpool. We showed them some of our favorite parts of town and together we even did a few things in Manchester that we’ve been holding out for.
We started off the visit by going to Christie’s Bistro, one of Wendy’s favorite cafes in an old library on campus. They especially liked seeing the rooms in the building that looked like the Great Hall from Hogwarts (see below)
Next was a visit to the Manchester Museum, where they, like the rest of England, are celebrating Darwin’s 200th Birthday. They had a lot of cool stuff on exhibition, including this giant spider crab. Wendy thought this was fun at first, but turns out she’s pretty scared of animals even when they’re stuffed (probably because she’s a vegetarian).
I guess she had reason to be scared, as I nearly got mauled by this awesome tiger.
We got to see the second-most complete T-Rex skeleton in the entire world, which Zeke was way too excited about while Wendy just got caught staring into the distance having Jurassic Park flashbacks.
That night, we talked Wendy into trying Indian food for the first time ever at a restaurant called the “Spicy Hut”…. and to my surprise she LOVED it! The meal was awesome, and now Wendy can’t stop talking about Poppadoms, even though she can’t really remember what they’re called. Good thing for her we live super close to Wilmslow Road, which is known around here as Manchester’s “Curry Mile.” Tons and tons of Indian food places right around the corner!
The next day was Halloween, and while we didn’t go out trick-or-treating, we had an even more awesome plan - a visit to Old Trafford for a Manchester United vs Blackburn Rovers game! The stadium is amazing - jam-packed with 90,000 screaming Brits, it’s no wonder they call this place the Theatre of Dreams. We managed to get some of the most interesting seats in the stadium - section 232, right next to the visiting fans. This meant us and the people around us were separated from the Blackburn fans by a living barricade of two rows of stadium security. While we never feared for our lives, we were introduced to a variety of chants that totally shattered the illusion that British people are a sophisticated bunch. Their favorite refrain was singing over and over “YOUR SUPPORT IS… (I won’t finish the chant but let’s just say it rhymes with plucking mitt).”
Here are a few shots from the pilgrimage to Old Trafford, (apologies to Brent for cutting him out of the first picture).
United won the match 2-0, though the game really wasn’t even that close. We got to see a couple of nice goals, including this absolutely brilliant (yes, I’m using their slang and I’m not ashamed) strike by Berbatov for the first goal:
One thing really capped off our evening: the use of these awesome (Zeke’s opinion, not Wendy’s) port-a-potty-esque outdoor urinal things that they set up all around the stadium. It’s basically a couple of walls and some cylinders in the corners that you pee into. Brent and I had to partake, naturally. I recommend adopting these in the States - saved an enormous amount of time, as we hardly had to break stride on the way to the tram back home.
Needless to say, Manchester proved to be pretty awesome - but more adventures awaited us in Liverpool, the home of the Beatles, the next day. Stay tuned for another post tomorrow. As always, thanks for reading!
