Old Trafford, Manchester

Note: thoughts about Manchester at the end of this entry

Before I get started on this entry, I just want to clarify some things: 1) I am not a Man U supporter, 2) I am not a soccer fan and lastly, 3) I know nothing about soccer apart from it being a sport that involves 22 grown men (who are paid obscene salaries) to run after a ball (oh, that and match results are predicted by psychic octopuses). I don't care what soccer is to you, or what vital part it plays in your life, but I am truly not interested in the ball (the stadium tour confirmed it) and never will be so don't come preaching soccer to me. 

Never. 

I will ask you if I really want to know.

If you think I sound like I'm talking about it like it's getting on my nerves... maybe it is. Or at least the people who are typing second-by-second updates on Facebook this world-cup are. Meh. Who will be reading your updates when people are busy listening to the live commentaries and watching the matches?

And in case you're wondering what the hell was I doing at Old Trafford if I'm not the least bit interested in football...  why not?! Maybe I would become a soccer convert after listening to all the glorious stories? It's just another obligatory tourist destination, and in any case, it was on the way from Cardiff to Lake District (our next destination).

F said she was just like me when it comes to soccer before she arrived in England for her studies last September (or was it October?). Then England changed her; it's probably takes great effort not to be influenced when it is the biggest sport in the country and you hear people talking about it all the time, or when you are so close (comparatively) to matches that the rest of the world can only watch on television.

Alright, enough blocks of text. The pictures will do the talking now :)

tsk tsk... who were you texting huhhhhhh?

it was a 10-minute walk from our hotel

err I am totally clueless as to who they are

obligatory tourist shot 1.

& here's tourist 2

we got to keep the lanyard that comes with it; I'm using it for my staff access card now!

taken from the box for the physically-disabled supporters

and another

tourists 1 and 2

the guy in the suit was our guide, Alan (though it sounded more like AH LAN due to the local accent)

some friendly going on... youths if I'd not remembered wrongly.
oh and the fourth guy from the left in the foreground (blue/purple shirt) is some famous player or something like that (Howard was it?)

last tourist shot in Manchester

and 2 again.

Oh. The stadium tour didn't make me any more interested than I thought it would; I got increasing restless as the minutes went by, and would struggle to process whatever information Alan was providing us with. I was so glad when it was finally over and we could proceed to the souvenir store to get some keychains/shirts for friends who might be a fan... and even more so when we headed to Piccadilly for some Primark shopping!

We went on the tram for the first time on this trip, and had a short glimpse of what city life is like here. Basically, the streets are much dirtier (I got a bit of a shock when we stepped out of the railway station) and the people look rougher as compared to London's. But like London, it's a cosmopolitan city with people of many different ethnicities. The place where we stayed at was located along Chester Road, 10 minutes by foot to Old Trafford but a little further away from Piccadilly, where the railway station was. We walked a long way (thank you for screwing us up Googlemaps) and passed by some dodgy neighbourhood where the residents stared hard at us like we were weird or something, and we also passed by the field of a high school. When the younger kids who were playing in the field saw us, they came running to the fences and started shouting "Konichiwa" and "Ni Hao" to us. Quite a funny sight.

On some of the characteristics of the local accent observed, I felt as though there's a lot of assimilation/linking going on; words seem to 'stick together' a lot and the ae (as in eh) vowel sounds more like a (as in ah); Alan sounds like Ah Lan and 'match' sounds like 'march'.

I know it's incredibly horrible of me to make a judgement of a place where I've only been for a day, BUT, Manchester just doesn't feel very safe to me. It's here where I realized that I've been taking the sense of security that we've always had in Singapore for granted, now that I've seen how bad it can be in places far away from home.

F realized that she'd lost her debit card after we finished shopping at Primark, and were having dinner at Subway. So she had to call up the bank to make a replacement.