It IS nice up North!

You know when you visit somewhere and you have some preconceptions about what its going to be like, but you tell yourself "It won't really be like that!"? And most of the time it isn't. This weekend I paid my first visit to Manchester to visit my friend Laura. I spent some of the train journey thinking about how accurate my view of Manchester would be. Surely they won't just play music by The Smiths, Happy Mondays and Stone Roses will they? And they DEFINITELY won't flail around, stomping they're feet on the spot in a fit of ecstasy fuelled bad dance moves circa 1990 while they listen to it will they? "Of course they won't!" I thought to myself, "What a silly Southern sausage I am!". But hang on a minute, because that's exactly what I saw quite a lot of people doing at various stages of my visit. Don't get me wrong, I'm not down on Manchester at all, in fact I loved it there, I was just a bit surprised that's all. It was actually pretty nice to see a place where everybody was really proud of they're town, especially coming from snobby Oxford. It was a really friendly place full of interesting buildings and shops, and I quickly felt pretty relaxed walking about the different places Laura showed me. I got a really nice Melvins poster and on Sunday we went to Urbis which is a big glass building full of pictures and projects about making cities more interesting places to be eg. there were some pictures of a massive pillow fight they had in San Francisco (I think). AND THE WEATHER WAS NICE AND SUNNY!