The first thing I noticed about Manchester were the red brick buildings - I haven't seen many of those recently (mainly grey/yellow stone buildings) so the change of colour was nice. I also discovered that the main downtown area of Manchester is compact enough to be easily walkable, which is always nice, but they also have free shuttle buses that go to main tourist sites (3 routes running every 10-20 minutes). I thought that was a really nice touch.
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| Albert Square |
I went to the Manchester Art Gallery, which was a refreshing change from most art galleries as the works of art were a bit mixed up all together. Instead of having all old paintings in one room and more contemporary works in another, they just stuck everything together like this:
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| Manchester Art Gallery |
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| "Big Booby #2"... not sure if there's a #1 somewhere |
I also went to the People's History Museum, the John Rylands Library, the Manchester Cathedral and the National Football Museum (where I learned that my dad's favourite team, the Wolverhampton Wanderers, were actually a great team once... I'm sure they'll get back there one day... just like I'm sure the Maple Leafs will eventually win another Stanley Cup. You know, one of those "maybe not in my lifetime but it's bound to happen at some point" things).
On Sunday, everything I had planned to see was closed (so maybe not great planning on my part) but I stumbled across the Centre for Chinese Contemporary Art. It's a small gallery showcasing Chinese contemporary art (I know, you'd never guess it from the gallery name). They had a neat exhibit about a Dutch design firm that created a mobile design service for Beijing Design Week to create "on the spot" logos for local small businesses. They gave the owners a survey to answer some brief questions about their businesses and then created a new logo for them right then and there. You can see some of the logos and read more about it here: http://www.lava.nl/newsitems/view/130/English
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