citymike

I arrived here yesterday and I will leave tomorrow and that's quite enough time thankyou very much.  It's not that I don't like the place but it's like visiting Leeds. I have taken one photograph in my 1.5 days here and that was of a pub. Last night I trawled the bars in the yuppie district and the first restaurant/bar I entered was awful, extrenely posh with an army of fawning waiters and it had just opened and so I was the only person in there. I ordered a beer which was presented to me before it was opened and I drank that pretty quickly. I told the waiter that I wouldn't eat but a couple of minutes later he told me that he had ordered a complementary starter on my behalf and I told him I wish he hadn't done that. That's how much I hate those places. The next bar was OK but cliquey and then I found the ""Classy bar".

The Classy bar was dark and tried but failed to be seedy. It had Frank Zappa posters on the wall and  everyone smoked and talked loudly about politics and how certain types of people were ridiculous and tried to demonstrate how clever they were, constantly. In other words, computer programmer yuppies! I recognised myself in bits of other people and like most of my colleagues in the UK these people would deny that they remotely resembled a yuppy. I only had to spend a weekend in Manchester to know that I was a yuppie. I loved the bar and I'll go there again tonight.

When I got back to the hotel, which is near the train station and 4km away from the yuppie part I got the shock of my life. During the day I had noticed a couple of bars but now it was dark  with the lights on I could see that half the shops were actually bars and these bars were most definitely seedy. The streets were crowded with a fair percentage that looked the worst for wear, it was like a downtown city centre after a football match but I didn't feel physically threatened at all, which maybe innocence.