.comment-link {margin-left:.6em;}

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.

Tuesday, September 11, 2007

 

Frank Sinatra - On a little street in Singapore

That familiar feeling returned the moment I stepped off the bus.


Geylang in all its grimy glory, a sensory treat for the esoteric and a fitting reminder of what I will be missing in UK. The pungent smoke that filled the air came from the burning paper offerings, a custom of the Hungry Ghost Festival meant to placate wandering souls, global warming notwithstanding. The usual smell of automotive exhaust was somewhat overwhelmed though the attendant din was at full force, at times augmented by passing vehicles with boomboxes pumping out unintelligible pulses at the lowest end of the audible frequency range at obnoxious volumes. It was either that or the roar of a turbocharged engine being revved more to fulfil exhibitionistic tendencies than a need for speed on a road where you’re only as fast as the car in front of you.


I'm pretty sure this wasn't the "little street" that Frank Sinatra was referring to.

Stepping away from the bus stop and into the walkway, the sights and smells of the food outlets in the shophouses were unavoidable. The Indian man making prata alternated between flipping the flattened dough in the air to stretch it paper thin and standing behind his teriyaki-like hot plate, lathered with oil and sizzling furiously when the stretched dough hit the plate. At the Teochew porridge stall, pans containing a myriad of dishes of proletarian fare were stacked 3 high across the counter which stretched across half the shop. Not exactly a sight for the indecisive, who aren’t taken to very kindly by impatient stallholders with hungry customers to serve.

The early dinner crowd had already gathered in the coffeeshops, some accompanied by women who wore their occupation on their sleeves (or lack thereof). Bottles of beer and buckets of ice served to counter the evening humidity as they conversed in a variety of languages and dialects, punctuated by guffaws and the slamming of hands on tables. The more sedate ones nursed their beer in silence as the rest of Geylangs’ denizens went on with their lives.

In between the ground floor units there were entrances to a staircase going up to the second floor. Some were dark, dank and smelt of something ripe and fermented that wasn’t wine, while others were dimly lit in a colour that indicated their line of business. A few of them had their….proprietors and employees standing in the doorway, presumably to welcome customers. After squeezing past the crowd standing in the walkway choosing from vegetables displayed outside a grocery store, I jaywalked across the road (as is the norm) to my destination.

A seafood dinner with pals from my first foray into the Singapore blues scene was one of the few farewell gatherings from my circle of friends. Above the noise from the evening traffic on the road beside us and the din from other tables, we recounted the gigs we played over 6 years as we peeled crustaceans and quaffed beer, cursing the lousy ones and laughing at the funny and memorable ones. All the characters we met along the way were recalled with varying levels of fondness. Apart from reminiscing about the past, there was also a fair bit of speculation about the future ahead, in particular my activities in Manchester outside of academic pursuits.

Suffice to say, que sera, que sera.

This page is powered by Blogger. Isn't yours?