Happy new year to everyone!

The New Year's celebrations seem to be much calmer here (in our middle-class neighbourhood) than it used to be in the Czech Republic (in the middle-class neighbourhood we used to live previously). Here, around midnight, many people fired some fireworks, and made a lot of noise, but at 12.30 am, everything was dead calm, and people were probably safe in their beds. In Prague, the amateur firework show usually lasted until 3 am!

(Maybe it has to do with the fact that the bus transport was once again very funny, and it was very difficult to get anywhere, and back. Therefore, people maybe did not drink that much at home, and there were not many really drunken people. In the Czech Republic, people do not limit their drinking to pubs, they are perfectly capable of partying hard at home, and therefore there is much more noise in the streets at 2 in the morning.)

We wanted to go for a long walk here in one of the parks. Ha ha! People often say, we do things differently here in Manchester, and it obviously also applies to parks and public places.

First thing is that there are not exactly many parks in our place. There is one very small, and one approx. 1 km from our house. Today, we checked Google Maps and found another park approx. 1 km from here. So we've decided to check it out.

In our cell phones, we use maps from Here (not Google Maps). However, Here just has no idea that there is a park, and lead us to a re-cultivated landfill instead. Of course the landfill a) is ugly, b) has an incredibly ugly surrounding, with discarded fridges and tires and things like that, c) cannot be entered.

Instead of a nice walk in a park, we've spent 1 hr trying to find the park, enter the park, and avoid the landfill. The road was surrounded by garbage, and there has obviously been some flooding in past few days / weeks, so there was also a lot of stinking mud. Nice, Here, thank you very much!

When we've finally discovered an entrance into the park, we've found that there are fences everywhere (because of the neighbouring landfill), and that the park itself is also full of unwanted stuff. We have seen for example:
- old shopping carts (one of them thrown into a small pond, it looked almost like a modern art project),
- decomposed motor scooter (the metal skeleton covered in rust lying between trees, with no tires and no other components than just the metal stuff - very post-apocalyptic),
- several burnt dustbins (some of them obviously used to be the blue paper-recycling bins),
- a little memorial made of burnt cans,
- meat, potatoes, oranges and grapes (all fresh, or 'fresh'), placed on a former campfire place together with the burnt remnants of some wood,
- something that looked like drugstore waste: pile of shampoos, single use shavers, and things like that, all arranged under one bench.

I am not even mentioning an endless stream of beer bottles, cider bottles, beer cans, cider cans, and other alcoholic beverages containers. All of them empty, of course.

Well, if this were our first similar experience, I would not draw any conclusion from this. But we have seen things like this before, with so much mess, so many broken things and garbage in some places! Including, of course. parks and gardens. I just wonder why a) people create such a mess, b) people tolerate it, c) city council tolerates it. And, speaking about the city council: where are all the high-viz clothes of the cleaning people?

I just don't get it.