That’s a chip french fry being dipped into a jar of mayo, in case you can’t tell…

I’ll be getting on a train tomorrow morning to London for the weekend. This should be the highlight of the trip. Manchester has been neat, and just being in a different culture is very interesting, but as far as sightseeing goes there’s not much here after you’ve seen the football soccer field.

I found a small (read: cheap) hotel about 1 km from Buckingham Palace; this should be an excellent base of operations for my recon mission. Probably will not have internet access though, so you’ll have to wait until Monday for pictures and stories. I hope to do a bit of trainblogging as well; I’m sure the scenery on the trip will be very cool.

The highlight of this week was Wednesday night, when I went to a 300+ year old pub called the Circus Tavern. It was extremely small; you could get from one side to the other in about 3 steps, and people were jammed in there extremely tight. It was like a scene straight out of a Saturday Night Live skit. Very drunken Englishmen on the verge of a fistfight one minute and hugging each other the next. Most of the discussion was centered around either soccer or the politics between Britain and Northern Ireland. I forgot to bring my camera, but I intend to go back and get some shots (and some pictures, too) before I leave.

In closing, here’s a picture of the machine that gives me a wonderful cup of cappuccino each morning at the office. I appreciate the fact that IP provides free coffee at Southwind, but they’ve got nothing on Capgemini’s little machine of wonders:

I thought I would finally post a few of the pictures I’ve taken during my trip. Yesterday was the Chinese new year, and my new hotel just happens to be two blocks south of Manchester’s Chinatown:

There were several rides at the festival, including the Jumping Jack, which is chinese for “Child Frightener”.

Also, there’s no Krispy Kreme here, but they do have

Finally, a couple of landmarks near the first hotel I stayed at. This is the Manchester United Football Soccer Club stadium:

A few nights ago I was walking home, and there was a demonstration outside of hundreds of MUFC fans protesting the proposed purchase of the club by Malcolm Glazer, an American who owns the Tampa Bay Buccaneers. The locals are not happy about this; they had a Malcolm Glazer doll being hung in a noose and were chanting threats about cutting off his head. Then, they started getting rude. By the way, SoccerFan is VERY tolerant. Apparently, Glazer has some Irish business parters; SoccerFan also wants to kill them, and took a great deal of pleasure in calling them Leprechauns.

A few blocks south of that is a cricket field. Cricket is sort of like baseball, except it sucks.

Speaking of baseball, pitchers and catchers report to spring training TOMORROW!

It’s not just the roads that are backwards; I rode an escalator at the mall today, and the one going up was on the left and the on going down on the right. Also, when walking through the mall, people naturally tended to walk to the left of the aisle. I guess it makes sense, but it still struck me as weird.

Speaking of the mall, the Trafford Centre was the biggest mall I’ve ever seen. It picks chunks bigger than Wolfchase out of its stool. Also, the wings were named like streets, and each store had an address over its entrance. I looked in the yellow pages to find out where a particular store was; it was listed as being at 124 Peel Ave., and I only found out later that ?Peel Avenue? is a wing inside the mall.

There was a movie theater (theatre) in the mall, and I stopped to see what was playing. I was interested to see that under the description of each movie, it listed specifically any questionable content. For example, the description of one movie stated “Contains one use of strong language and a moderate scene of injury.”

One last thing that struck me today: I have not done a true scientific study, but my preliminary results show that EVERY SINGLE PERSON in Britain smokes. You can’t go into a restaurant without seeing a cancer stick hanging out of everyone?s mouth. There are “non-smoking sections,” but what separates the non-smoking section from the smoking section is a thick wall of nothing. I see non-smokers about as often as I see the sun, which is never.

I had one of these last night:

IRN-BRU is a Scottish soft drink that is more popular locally than Coke. It tastes kind of like rusty bubblegum-flavored Mountain Dew, but in a good way. It is hard to explain–the description sounds gross but it was good.

I like British bath fixtures. There is a knob for temperature and a separate knob for turning the water on and off. Therefore, you only have to set the temperature once and never touch that knob again, instead of trying to find the perfect temp every time you turn the shower on.

Television stations are different. There are a few BBC channels which I assume are run by the government; other standard channels are known only by their channel number–no call letters. There are billboards around town advertising the “Joey” sitcom (how unfortunate that this is the US show they’ve chosen to run). On the billboards, the channel is simply listed as Five. In the US, 5 is a different channel in every city you go to; in the UK, 5 is 5 regardless of where you are.

As I was getting ready for work this morning I had the tv on, and there was a commercial for a new CD–a collection of Elvis songs. I’m not even particularly an Elvis fan, but I appreciated the commercial because it was a little piece of home.

Last night I decided to brave the public transportation system. I found a Metro stop near the hotel (the Metro is like an above-ground subway) and took it to what turned out to be a sort of Chinatown section of Manchester. Ate at a Cantonese restaurant, and it was good. It is always interesting seeing people of different ethnic backgrounds speaking with a British accent. It was like looking at Jackie Chan and hearing James Bond.

I’m currently in Manchester, UK on business; I’ve been here for 2 days now, and am still adjusting to both the time change and the culture. Some observations:

1. Europeans love their soccer. Or football. Or whatever. All I know is on the 20-minute taxi ride from the airport to the hotel, the guy on the radio (music station, not sports talk) mentioned David Beckham at least 5 different times. Not 5 times in a single conversation; 5 different times between other songs.

2. Aside from the obvious traffic differences inherent in driving on the opposite side of the street, there are other differences as well. For example, the traffic light goes to yellow before turning green; its like a warning that you are about to be able to go.

3. It took almost a day before I started asking people to explain things. At first I didn’t want to look ignorant, but now I’d rather ask a stupid question and actually learn.

4. Voltage matters.

More later when I have time.