This weekend, the Christmas Market opened here in Manchester. Manchester claims to have the biggest Christmas market in the world, and the best Christmas market in Europe, so it's a big thing here. And of course we had to see it.

We've observed the setting of the stands. It all began shortly after the beginning of November. We, as regular visitors to the city centre, have observed the empty wooden houses being built, and the decoration put up. It started to appear in every other street (not just in front of the city council, but seemingly everywhere), and we wondered how big the market would be. Well, it's huge, it really is, and Manchester people say it's really the biggest market in the world, and after yesterday and today, we believe them.

Anyway. We have observed the following funny and/or interesting things:

- It is possible to buy beer and actually drink it (which, after we've been to non-alcoholic bonfire night, was a surprise), but not without any limitation. There are small fences which delimit the market areas, and every fence has posters on it which forbid bringing alcoholic beverages outside the area delimited by the fences. O_o

- There's a huge 'German beer German sausage' fashion, which we don't mind at all. But of course there are buts. The beer is warm and contains less gas than it should. Funny English people!

- The market really spreads through the whole city centre. There are maybe 10 main streets and 5 main squares with stand.

- The stands sell Christmas-themed stuff (uh oh), clothes (some of it appears not bad), bags, furniture, gardening tools and flower bulbs, bonsai trees, Buddha statues, French cheese and delicatessen, Swiss cheese, Dutch cheese and wafers, Spanish sausages and meat, Greek olives, million kinds of sweets, hot wine (with some rather odd tastes such as strawberry or amaretto, yuck), and so on and so on.

- There appear to be real French, German, Dutch, Spanish, etc. people selling the respective goods.

- People drop money all the time, especially small coins. It seems that they don't care at all, and they for sure don't bother picking other people's money from the ground! (Maybe they do not even see it.)

- I have also dropped money, £1 to be precise, and it fell in between some planks so I could not get it back. (Grrr.) But I've soon raised £1.18, coming from picking money lying on the ground, and returning one glass left behind by some guy. (There are deposits on glasses there.).

- There are, like, thousands of people there, but they are more or less polite, and no one sells junk Russian souvenirs there, which is a nice surprise compared to similar events in the Czech Republic.

- Overall, the experience is not so bad, but I suspect that I am biased already, because I've had two German wheat beers. :-)