Liverpool & Manchester: pictures

Liverpool











'Dont touch the Dalek. Or you will be EX-TER-MI-NA-TED'







Manchester

Liverpool & Manchester # 2

Read #1 here

In the early morning I, and the rest of the room, were awakened by my some Asian roommate, who decided to repack all of his bags very thoroughly, during the course of one hour. Now that, was really annoying.

Around 10 I check out at the Hatters Hostel and make my way to Liverpool Lime Street Station. After a 45 minute train trip, I arrive at Manchester Picadilly Station. I try to find my way to the Hatters Hostel, through this – apparently – busier city. It also appears to be larger and more vibrant than Liverpool. Just as I have the feeling I’m starting to get lost, I find out I’m actually on the correct street. I make my way to the hostel, which seems to be housed in an even more worn down building than the one in Liverpool, like some sort of squat. I am greeted by a nice bearded Mancunian who informs me the room will be ready in 2 hours. He asks me what I want to visit, I say I’d like to visit some museums and maybe some of the Smiths landmarks. He then prints a guide and has trouble stapling the papers together, eventually half destroying my ‘the Smiths guide to Manchester’–guide. Then I’m off to explore Manchester a bit, as I can't go to my room yet.

My first impressions were that Manchester looks a bit like Rotterdam (or maybe any other big Dutch city, but I’m most familiar with Rotterdam), most likely because of the public transport system: trams. Hadn’t seen that before in England. Again, this probably proves that Manchester is larger than Liverpool.
There are more people out and about in the commercial area that is Manchester Picadilly. The people still seem very (working class) British, some chavvy and orange faced as well. Yet, Manchester also seems more racially diverse than Liverpool.

After some wandering around, I decide it’s time to check out my room. ‘You’re back’, bearded Macunian receptionist notes. I was slightly disappointed to find out I was on the second floor, ‘the Badly Drawn Boy + The Charlatans floor’, rather than on the first floor ‘the Morrissey floor’.
I am in a 10-bed female dorm this time, you can’t choose your own bed and the bathroom/toilets are not connected to the room.
After ‘settling’ in the room and making a vague plan of what I wanted to see/do, I decided to go out again, armed with my camera this time. I made my way to the Northern Quarter, which, I had read, was supposed to be a trendy hipster area for young people. It all seemed deserted, worn down buildings and dodgy people. Found a few nice second hand shops, though. I wanted to find ‘Big Pink Records’, which was supposed to be a cool recordshop, but it seemed to have disappeared. One stop on the The Smiths guide, some Moz mosaic wall near Afflecks Place, seemed to be invisible as well. Nosed around in a vinyl recordshop, and thought about giving trying to find the Kraak Gallery another go. I did and found some signs with arrows, but they led me to deserted alleyways, so I gave up.
I went back to the centre and wandered up north, browsing through interesting looking shops.
Next stop is the Urbis Art Centre, which, sth I already feared, was closed for business. After walking around the Manchester Cathedral I decide it’s pubtime, after all, today is Saint Patrick’s Day. I go to the Printworks, a large covered restaurant area. I eat fish & chips and drink a Guinness and then move on to another pub in different part of town.

I end up getting free Guinness from Norwegian guys, who invite me to sit at their table; I join them, not being sure what their intentions are, as one of them is extremely drunk. They also give me 10 pounds, because ‘you’re a student, we work’, something I reluctantly accept after they insist on me taking it and trying to shove it in my pocket. After a while, the drunk guy starts making clear that he is attracted to me, and the others agree when he states that I am beautiful. To me, all of them look post-mid-thirties, even though the drunk one says he’s 25, and I’m not interested anyway, so I politely try to make clear that I’m not impressed. I get a bunch of phone numbers ‘for going out tomorrow’ and one of them gives me a half kiss on the mouth before he leaves….. Shouldn’t have accepted that Guinness.

After a good sleep that night (beer makes me fall asleep instantly. And pee as well, as I wake up with a full blatter 3 hours later), a shower and some of the 24 hour-breakfast (consisting of toast and… toast) I go into town again. First stop is the Manchester Art Gallery, where some interesting art work is to be seen. Of course the Gallery is suddenly occupied by retards, children on school trips and art students on excursion; instant headache material.

Next stop is the Cornerhouse, an arts centre with a café, cinema, bookstore and a small art gallery. The Art Gallery features an exhibition with David Mackintosh work, but I wasn’t very impressed by it.
After a coffee I go on my way to try to find the Salford Lads Club. I walk past the Ritz, where the Smiths played their first live show. After a long search, interrupted by a visit to a Science Museum, I was very close, I could feel it, but somehow I couldn’t exactly find it.... I ended up on some weird industry area next to busy motorway. At this point I was also incredibly tired and hungry. Adding the shite weather: I got frustrated and started walking back to the centre.
I visited the People’s History Museum, a great museum featuring a display of pictures of protesters being arrested during demonstrations and they had a lot of old political campaign material etc. Afterwards I went to the John Ryland Library. The interior is strange compared to the exterior of the building, it’s a very modern building housing a very old library, the interior of the library itself reminds me of Oxford, and the buildings there.

Afterwards I go back to the hostel, and lie down on the bed for a while and have my Sainsbury’s pasta dinner. Then I started a conversation with the roommate who had been in the room the whole time since I came back. She turned out to be an Italian girl living in Glasgow and she was following her favourite band around the country, apparently she was some superfan who was in love with the singer blah blah. Expensive hobby… well, definitely more expensive than my concert-hobby, I don’t have to stay in a hostel every night and take trains all over England.
I go to some bars at Matthew Street, have a chat with some bartender and am soon bored with sitting on my own in pubs, resulting into me going back to the hostel and falling asleep again.

The next morning I have to check out at 10, but my train leaves at about 3, so in order to kill time I go shopping a bit more. I go inside Afflecks Place, which is basically like the Brick Lane Sunday Vintage Market, but still amazing, great building, like a maze where can get lost between the alternative and vintage shops. I find some more great shops, which I hadn’t found on the days before, among them another record store, vintage clothes stores and a camera shop.

On the way back to London on the train, I felt a sense happiness dawning on me, just having had nice adventure on my own, and then sitting on that train, watching the foggy British countryside which reminded me off the Adolphe Valette paintings I had seen the day before at the Manchester Art Gallery pass by, while reading ’31 Songs’ by Nick Hornby and listening to music. It was just one of those moments of pure happiness, having a feeling of complete contentment and satisfaction.

So, all in all I like both cities, they have a lot in common, but are also quite different. They seem great places to live, though I slightly prefer Manchester, and still, both are not as vibrant and fascinating as London. But I guess that’s just from the perspective of a Londoner.
If you ever find yourself in Manchester; I highly recommend the Manchester Art Gallery, Afflecks Place and the People’s History Museum and for Liverpool are the Albert Dock and Tate Liverpool must sees.

Liverpool & Manchester #1 (FINALLY)

It’s strange how easily you forget a whole world outside London exists, a world where you can walk everywhere easily, where it’s rather quiet, where almost everyone is ‘British’ , where there are no red double decker buses and where you can’t understand a word people are saying. It makes you think of London as a bubble, a cosmopolitan bubble of noise, business men and women, rushing, long distances, tourists, too many things to do and see, expensiveness and racial diversity. At the same time, once you’ve lived in London, you realize that nothing can measure up to the city and the life you led there, except maybe if you move to New York or Los Angeles.

I quite enjoyed my 5-day break (last week) in which I went on holiday to Liverpool and Manchester, as I spend the days in a sort of lonely happiness, wandering around the cities and exploring on my own. Surely in the evening you miss someone to talk to, or to go out with, but other than that it’s very relaxing.

Liverpool seemed a fairly small city to me, it has some nice museums and it’s pretty quiet. Let’s say Oxford on an average afternoon seems busier than Liverpool. The Northern accent, especially the Scouse in Liverpool, is horrendous. The whole time my conversations with Liverpudlians were somewhat along the following sentences: ‘excuse me?’, ‘what?’, ‘I’m sorry?’ and ‘Pardon?. Some other small things I found strange were the buses; Liverpool has the same hideous green Arriva buses as in the Netherlands and obviously no red double decker buses. Silly how easily you get used to those. The people also seem more British... and by British I mean chavvy. Every 2 minutes you will spot an 'orange faced girl' as I like to call them, girls who have so much make up on their faces appear to be orange. We have them in London as well, but up north they are more noticeable somehow, as the population mainly consists of working class people, whereas London has more well dressed business people and a lot of racial diversity, and tourists as well.
Something else regularly spotted: fat women smoking cigarettes.... while pushing a stroller with a child in it.....

I spent the first day in Liverpool exploring the centre a bit, just strolling around streets and shops, and I visited ‘The Bluecoat’, which is a rather unimpressive arts centre, and ‘FACT’, another arts centre which exhibited a cool project by a Dutch artist named Renzo Martens, called ‘Episode 1’, as a part of FACT’s ‘MyWar: Participation in an Age of War’. It questions the morals, motives and implications of the news media during wars, something that has connections with the theme the great Joris Luyendijk also wrote about in his book ‘Het Zijn Net Mensen’ (translation: ‘Just like people’), though Renzo Martens’ film was there before Luyendijk’s book came out.

Here an excerpt from the FACT guide:
‘In Episode I, Dutch artist Renzo Martens asks his audience to contemplate the motivations behind personalities who provide a documentary view of a war-torn world. Holding a camera up to his face, Martens waltzes with shameless exhibitionism through refugee camps, UN headquarters, and devastated cities. He subverts traditional expectations by preying on vulnerable people asking them repeatedly, ‘What do you think of me?’. The reactions are both comic and hostile. In one of the penultimate scenes, Martens is confronted by an NGO worker who asks him, “What do you want? Images of starving babies? Tears?”. “I want tears”, he responds. In this anxious moment, the filmmaker’s personal affection with the conflict becomes apparent – unravelling the hypocrisy of the global media system, and the humanitarian efforts that rely on it for survival’.
More details about it Here

As the Beatles are still one of the greatest moneymaking devices for the Liverpudlians, a visit to the famous ‘Cavern Club’ on Matthew Street can’t be left out, where the Beatles played many gigs in their early days.

In the evening when I went back to my hostel, where I had booked the cheapest room: an 8-bed mixed room, I meet one of my roommates; a fellow Londoner (originally Australian of course, nobody you meet from London is British) who went up to Liverpool just for a match and would only stay one night. He leaves for the match, and I go to a pub where I buy the cheapest dinner and beer during my time in England so far: 3.50 pounds for a meal and 1.60 for a pint. After a while I go back to the hostel, as sitting in a pub on your own is not that fun, even when you have a book. I read some more, have a chat with my two Spanish roommates and eventually fall asleep.

When I wake up the second day I notice some other beds are occupied by 2 guys now as well. Later I meet them, they’re Italian brothers who came to England for the match (who comes to England for Liverpool-Portsmouth anyway?). They wanted to go to a game in London that night as well, but eventually they didn’t find tickets. After a satisfying breakfast in the hostel’s dining hall I ‘hit the road’ again, firstly heading to the Oxfam shop, where I had laid my eyes on some analogue cameras just the day before, I ended up buying two, hoping I will get them working at some point.

The next stop is the Albert Dock, Liverpool’s most interesting attraction in my opinion. I noticed a duckmarine, some weird boat/car thing, that goes both on land and in water, but I decide not to take a ride as it’s probably expensive. For this reason I also skip ‘The Beatles Story’ (8 pounds for students, oh come on).
What I do visit is Tate Liverpool, which of course in no way compares to Tate Modern, but they had a nice sculpture exhibition called ‘This Is Sculpture’ (very creative) curated by Michael Craig-Martin, featuring works like ‘Lobster Telephone’ by Dalí, ‘Face Of Statues’ by Margritte, ‘Fountain’ by Duchamp and some works I had already seen before at Tate Modern 2 years prior, among them ‘Three Ball Total Equilibrium Tank’ by Jeff Koons. Some of the other artworks featured were by Max Ernst, Henri Matisse, Henry Moore and Francis Bacon.

I also paid a visit to the International Slavery Museum, which I have mixed feeling about… it seems somehow too political correct, and like saying: oh we apologize for exploiting these people by building this museum, even though we’re glad we did it because it made us a wealthy nation.

The weather today was great, so I sat on benches by the water enjoying the sun as well. I wanted to visit the Liverpool Life Museum, but it was being renovated, so I walked around some more and then went back into the city and visited the Walker Art Gallery, which featured a lot of old paintings, but also some modern work, by David Hockney for example.

That evening I wanted cheap dinner, so I went to a kebab shop down the road and while I was eating I had a conversation with the guy behind the counter, a psychology student at the University of Liverpool. After that I went back to the hostel and fell asleep quite early, as I was knackered.
The next morning however....

CLIFFHANGER!

#2 will follow soon, and pictures will follow at some point as well, not sure when.