Wednesday, September 19, 2007
We've only just begun...
It’s been almost a week since I arrived in Manchester and I’m slowly warming up to it (literally).
For someone who comes from a tropical island on the equator where it’s summer all year round, England takes some getting used to. If you’d like to try it out sometime, just turn your air-conditioner to the lowest setting possible and have an industrial fan blow the cold air into your face. For added authenticity, get someone else to sprinkle random drops of water into the path of the wind. The cold (or perceived lack thereof) doesn’t faze most Brits, some of them get by with just T-shirt and bermudas while yours truly is wrapped up and still feeling the cold. I’m told it gets worse.
Apart from the fact that I live on the top floor (14th) in a building with an eccentric, arthritic lift, the student accommodation I’m staying in is alright I guess. The dubious stains on the floor carpeting of my room, the seemingly paper-thin walls separating the rooms which afford little privacy of sound and the spartan furniture are things I can get used to. The most important feature of my accommodation is that there is a pub just downstairs that serves the local clientele and is strangely devoid of students despite being in the middle of a student housing area. There’s beer on tap and football on TV, pretty much all I need for a good evening. Some of the crowd are crusty old-timers with faded tattoos on their forearms and once I witnessed a heated discussion (ale-fuelled no doubt) almost come to blows, though almost as quickly as it came the respective parties were hushed and everyone went back to their pints. Not anything more unusual than what we get back home.
Classes haven’t started proper, but we’ve had some introductory sessions with the lecturers who seem a splendid bunch. It’s a small class with a good mix of nationalities, which should make for some interesting discussions. Course content looks rather challenging, being mostly mathematical in nature. For the mathematically average like myself, I foresee either intensive work or panicked confusion in the near future.
I’ve also found some time to head to the town centre and take in some of the city, at both day and night time. The city itself is a rather interesting blend of old and new. Buildings dating from the Industrial Revolution and Manchesters' history as the centre of cotton trade, 19th century cathedrals and churches, olde-style English pubs, modern glass-façade commercial centres and shopping malls, cobblestone walkways and tar roads and even a ferris wheel all seem to co-exist within the confines of the city, though they may not all look congruous standing next to each other. Guitar shops were another necessary feature of my urban scouting expedition, and there were some that will warrant a return visit, even if it’s just to fulfil a strange, innate desire to be surrounded by a wall of guitars.
The nightlife seems to be centred mainly on the clubbing scene, with a whole range of venues that scarcely appeal to my musical and aesthetic sensibilities, apart from their female clientele (more on that in the future). Those venues that do feature live bands focus mainly on genres that are less than exciting for me, but at this stage it is still too early to write off the music scene altogether. I will continue my hunt.
The population in general seems a lot more diverse than what I would have expected. Walking down the streets of Manchester city, there were people of South Asian, Middle Eastern, African and Chinese descent alongside the British in varying proportions. Sitting in the public bus I could hear a variety of languages other than English that were mostly unfathomable apart from the lilt of articulate Mandarin or the familiar inflections of Cantonese. However, for all the diversity there is, how much they really socialise with each other remains to be seen.
And of course, that includes me.
For someone who comes from a tropical island on the equator where it’s summer all year round, England takes some getting used to. If you’d like to try it out sometime, just turn your air-conditioner to the lowest setting possible and have an industrial fan blow the cold air into your face. For added authenticity, get someone else to sprinkle random drops of water into the path of the wind. The cold (or perceived lack thereof) doesn’t faze most Brits, some of them get by with just T-shirt and bermudas while yours truly is wrapped up and still feeling the cold. I’m told it gets worse.
Apart from the fact that I live on the top floor (14th) in a building with an eccentric, arthritic lift, the student accommodation I’m staying in is alright I guess. The dubious stains on the floor carpeting of my room, the seemingly paper-thin walls separating the rooms which afford little privacy of sound and the spartan furniture are things I can get used to. The most important feature of my accommodation is that there is a pub just downstairs that serves the local clientele and is strangely devoid of students despite being in the middle of a student housing area. There’s beer on tap and football on TV, pretty much all I need for a good evening. Some of the crowd are crusty old-timers with faded tattoos on their forearms and once I witnessed a heated discussion (ale-fuelled no doubt) almost come to blows, though almost as quickly as it came the respective parties were hushed and everyone went back to their pints. Not anything more unusual than what we get back home.
Classes haven’t started proper, but we’ve had some introductory sessions with the lecturers who seem a splendid bunch. It’s a small class with a good mix of nationalities, which should make for some interesting discussions. Course content looks rather challenging, being mostly mathematical in nature. For the mathematically average like myself, I foresee either intensive work or panicked confusion in the near future.
I’ve also found some time to head to the town centre and take in some of the city, at both day and night time. The city itself is a rather interesting blend of old and new. Buildings dating from the Industrial Revolution and Manchesters' history as the centre of cotton trade, 19th century cathedrals and churches, olde-style English pubs, modern glass-façade commercial centres and shopping malls, cobblestone walkways and tar roads and even a ferris wheel all seem to co-exist within the confines of the city, though they may not all look congruous standing next to each other. Guitar shops were another necessary feature of my urban scouting expedition, and there were some that will warrant a return visit, even if it’s just to fulfil a strange, innate desire to be surrounded by a wall of guitars.
The nightlife seems to be centred mainly on the clubbing scene, with a whole range of venues that scarcely appeal to my musical and aesthetic sensibilities, apart from their female clientele (more on that in the future). Those venues that do feature live bands focus mainly on genres that are less than exciting for me, but at this stage it is still too early to write off the music scene altogether. I will continue my hunt.
The population in general seems a lot more diverse than what I would have expected. Walking down the streets of Manchester city, there were people of South Asian, Middle Eastern, African and Chinese descent alongside the British in varying proportions. Sitting in the public bus I could hear a variety of languages other than English that were mostly unfathomable apart from the lilt of articulate Mandarin or the familiar inflections of Cantonese. However, for all the diversity there is, how much they really socialise with each other remains to be seen.
And of course, that includes me.
# posted by BloozeGit @ 5:57 pm 
