Pfff, buses!

Few days/weeks ago, I criticized the trams here, and while I still insist that the trams are far from optimal, they are probably still much (much much) better than the buses. As mentioned already in some of the previous posts, the trams do not really cover all Greater Manchester (i.e. Manchester, Salford, and all the suburbs). There are many places where there are no trams, and no trains, and just nothing more than the buses. Therefore, there are many people (yours truly included) who just have no other option than bus - or car, if you happen to have one (or bike, if you are Dutch crazy enough to ride a bike in this weather & traffic).

Anyway. Yesterday, I have set a new record. I waited for the f. bus for 45 (yes, forty five) minutes. It was cold, and when I came to the bus stop, there were already many people, which is always a sign that there was no bus for some time. However, there was no bus nowhere to be seen. As I would have to walk few miles (in office shoes!), I decided to wait; it seemed that the bus would come every second now. However, only new people arrived, no bus. Not even different lines - nothing.

After some 20 minutes, some buses started to arrive, and guess what - none of them was my bus. So I waited and waited. I was freezing, tired, and more and more angry. And when the bus finally arrived, it was a small bus only - not a doubledecker, and not this long bus which can bend. Just a small, short bus. Consequence - people waiting on my station could go in. People on the next stations could not. The driver kept repeating to them, 'only one please'. I can only guess how so very angry they had to be after 45 min of waiting...

Anyway, I did not really expect the way home to be easy. After all, if the buses are not coming, they are obviously stuck somewhere, and this somewhere must be a traffic jam, and if this traffic jam is not really in the city centre, then it has to be somewhere else, for example on my way home - and oh yes, it was there. Magnificent again, superb, and occupying even places which it never occupied before!

So it took me another 45 min to arrive to my station.

I left the bus, and as I was walking home, I said many, many Czech swear words. Really many of them.

My husband had to go to Edinburgh on Monday. He got a train ticket, which was for a specific train at 7.45 am from Manchester Piccadilly.

He is a cautious man, and so on Sunday evening he wanted to check whether the train would really go as scheduled, especially in the light of all the fun we've had already with the railways here. He tried to find a website which would inform about the train departures, but was not very successful; all the websites he's found seemed to only display part of the information. And none of them had the 7.45 Edinburgh train.

That was suspicious of course, but we did not panic. There may be some info missing somewhere, or who knows what. That would be no surprise here. However, there was the little doubt inside his head already.

On Monday morning, it was finally confirmed: there is no 7.45 Edinburgh train. Instead, there is another train which goes to York, and there you have to change and go by another train. Which arrives approx. 1 hr later than the original (nonexistent) train.

Well, at first, I thought, this cannot be possibly serious. How come that the railway people sell tickets for trains they know wouldn't go? Seriously? The ticket was only purchased few days before the travel, and they had to know already.

Well, I am just adding this to the list of the UK funny railway stuff.

And now for something completely different. I think I've mentioned already that English people come to work dressed casually, and they only change into dress-code-compliant stuff once in the office. Well, you'd expect them to do such thing somewhere in private, right?

Ha ha! No. Today, I have seen one guy walking the corridor and trying to put a belt into its place. O_o Imagine how ridiculous it looks, a guy in suit and everything, trying to wrestle his belt and put it in the tiny loops provided on the trousers, while walking an office corridor during an ordinary morning...

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.

As mentioned in the previous post, we have made few trips around Manchester in past few days. To be more precise, we have visited four cities in four days: Liverpool, Sheffield, Chester and Leeds. Here are my impressions.

Liverpool

Beatles. And port. And Beatles. And ships, docks and warehouses. And of course John, Paul, George and Ringo! Of course Beatles are everywhere. You can get Beatles souvenirs in every shop, and there are several museums showing artifacts and things.

We arrived at the (famous?) train station on Lime Street. It takes less then an hour from Manchester. The city appears bigger than Mcr, and there are more of these suburb unified houses. (It's like copypasted city really, and I immediately started wondering. Many people say that the communist housing projects with panel houses etc. are horrible, with no schools, no shops etc., but this English suburb style seems to be exactly the same thing. The panel houses are higher (sometimes as many as 20 floors), and they are not made of bricks, but apart from these 'cosmetic' differences, it seems exactly the same. The houses in the suburbs (and not just Liverpool suburbs! We have this in Mcr as well) are all exactly the same, with nothing between them, just the same streets all over and over again. I don't really see how this is any better.

Anyway, back to Liverpool-specific stuff. We went to see the docks, and that is really nice. There is a promenade along the river. There is the river! And there are ancient docks, with old ships there. And warehouses. And more docks. And some modern ships (some of them go to Isle of Man, and some to Ireland).  The river is wider than any other river I have ever seen (but it's true that I have never seen delta of Danube, or Amazon...). And there are tides, because it's very close to the sea. The river went 5m lower during low tide (afternoon) than during high tide (morning). Which was a surprise for us, because we are from an inland country.

There is also a huge cathedral in Liverpool. From the outside, it looks like some communist building because it's all squares and it's so huge it looks really out of proportion. Exactly as the spectacular communist show-off buildings! (It reminds me of Hotel International in Prague - just compare the pictures! Cathedral v the hotel.) It would be enough to put a red star on the top of the building, and here we go, Moscow architecture...

But to be not that harsh: inside, the cathedral is beautiful. It's really impressive, the space, the stained glass, the side chapels, the organ (which makes sounds so deep that it hurts), and all the details, everything is the finest stuff. You can tell that these people were incredibly rich, and willing to invest the money into the Lord's house.

In Liverpool, the cathedral is not the only huge building. Some of them look like a New York architecture (roughly the same style as Empire State Building but a bit lower). It's just that the whole city is like that: it's spectacular. After all, they say that some 9 million people emigrated through Liverpool to the US in the old days, and the port and docks were there long before that. All the people, merchants, ships etc. must have left so much money there!

The city is rich even these days. There are fancy shops, art galleries, modern office buildings, etc. Money everywhere! And it is indeed very nice to see.

Sheffield

The city of stainless steel (previously), and of the Sheffield Hallam University (today). We went there between Christmas and New Year, and maybe that's why the city looked a bit boring... because it was almost empty!

There are two cathedrals in Sheffield, one of them (the smaller one) is catholic, the other one (the bigger one) is Anglican. There are some quite interesting steel statues in the Anglican cathedral, and the inner space is very nice.

There is also very good industry museum, where you can have a look on River Don Engine (which is huge!) and on other engineering stuff. They show you how the steel is made, and what the history of the steel industry was. There is also awesome kid's exhibition where you can go through the steel process yourself (pretending that you are molten steel, and get pressed, stamped etc.). If you ever go to Sheffield, don't forget to visit Kelham Island and the museum. (Bonus: there is a museum café where you can have quite impressive sandwiches!)

Chester

Incredibly photogenic, painfully cute, kitsch city. Everyone has to go to Chester and see it, because Chester is beautiful.

It doesn't seem to be at the first sight. The train station is a bit 'boring', just an ordinary station which is not bad, but it't not the most beautiful train station in the world, and you have to walk ca 1 km to the city centre. However, once you arrive there, you have to be impressed!

There was a Roman fortress of Deva in the old ages, and the old Roman fortification is still there. And you can climb up the wall and walk it! It's ca 3 km long, and it's a very nice walk around the city, with some medieval things, and a view of the castle. (That is funny, because 'Chester' means castle, so Chester Castle is literally Castle Castle. Lol!) The fortification goes past the river Dee, and a canal, which is itself quite romantic.

In the city centre, there are many cute white and black houses, some of them 4 floors high. In the city centre, there are many shops, and in the houses, there's also a shopping gallery which you can enter via stairs and walk as well, It's incredibly, disgustingly beautiful!

In the Roman times, Chester / Deva used to be a big sea port, and later it was a market town, and obviously a busy and important one. Which means that everything is sophisticated, decorated, and with a lot of attention to details.

Apart from shopping and building-gazing, there is again a cathedral (with fine stained glass windows (I especially liked the modern ones, e.g. this one), and a cloister, and an old church court equipment). And if you ever come to Chester, visit the Burger Shed 41, Marvellous burgers, and superb doughnuts and ice cream as a dessert. You have to wait to be seated, but it is well worth the struggle!

Chester is not at all far from Wales. Meaning that the buses sometimes end in Wales, and there are Welsh names of places written on these buses. It looks very funny; if you have never seen or heard Welsh, try the BBC Cymru. For example, this and this should be the same article in Welsh and in English, respectively.)

Leeds

Leeds is supposed to be the shopping centre of England (maybe the whole Great Britain), but we were less then impressed.

There is a cathedral which is closed, and some churches which are also closed. There is a canal which is mostly inaccessible because it's all private property. There are many shops, but right now they only sell stuff that they could not sell during Christmas (and we could not come across anything decent in our size). And there is a beautiful market place, which is very art nouveau, but which is full of cheap clothes and cheap home equipment.

The only positive thing is that there are two comics shops.

Summary

We will visit Liverpool and Chester again, and whenever someone visits us, we will take them there. and show them all the stuff.
We will probably visit Sheffield or Leeds only if there is something really interesting - exhibition, theatre, concert. And I guess that we will leave shortly after the event ends.

Edit: stinking, lousy Google has crashed in the middle of updating the blog, and the previous post (the one referred to in the current post) just disappeared. It contained few funny little stories about train travelling in the UK, and some interesting things about buying knives (and having to show your ID to buy them) and everyday things like that. Well, it's gone. I am not going to write it again. :( Hi ho.

Long time no post! Sorry for that, many things have happened in past few weeks.

Of course most of these things have been associated with Christmas. I will try to provide some details of English Christmas celebrations below.

1/ The Secret Santa
Very funny thing; maybe you know it and/or do it yourself. We did this in my company with some colleagues. It works like this.
You persuade bunch of people to participate. (I thought this to be difficult, but obviously this is quite popular here and may people like it and participate. In fact, I thought that this was some 'kid's stuff', something that only young people participate in. Then I was heard people from another company talking about who's secret Santa of whom and whether they have this sorted already or not, and they were talking about this stuff in the lift. Which in my opinion means that it's widespread.)
You put their names in a hat; people pick one name from the hat (if they pick their name, they have to give it back and repeat).
Everyone has someone's name, and has to buy a present for that person. (There's usually a cap on spending, to avoid people getting too cheap or too expensive presents.)
Not surprisingly, it was all fun. It showed that some people know some people quite well! Anyway, they know me well, because I got a gift that suits me.

2/ The Christmas parties
Endless. At least three of them in our company (which probably means that there are also at least three of them in any other group, club, sports establishment, etc. etc.).
Our company has a certain very stupid tradition which has to be observed by newcomers. (It's like an initiation.) I did not like it at all; I don't really understand why people are being punished and humiliated for joining the company. But as English people say: hi ho.

3/ Pubs full of people
This is closely connected to the previous point. Everyone is celebrating Christmas with endless parties, and therefore the pubs are exceptionally full, day and night. It all starts in early December, and continues to the Christmas day.

4/ Christmas crackers, crowns, and stuff
This is Christmas partyware. A cracker looks like a giant candy. Everyone gets one cracker. Two people sitting next to each other pull the opposite parts of the cracker. The cracker breaks under the pressure, but asymmetrically, and one of the people gets approx. 2/3 of a cracker - with some hidden little present, while the other person gets nothing. There's also usually a paper crown in each cracker, and these are distributed evenly between the people, so everyone gets one crown.
There are usually also other things on the table, such as balloons (better: elongated, sausage-like balloons, so that people can beat each other with it) and miniature confetti shooters (pull a string, and it 'explodes' and sprays papers on people).
In few words: it's a mess.

5/ Trees (and no carps)
Like in the Czech Republic, Christmas trees are sold on many places, usually directly in the streets. Obviously (as advertised), the prices start at £39. we did not buy a Christmas tree - as usually, we've bought a bottle of whisky instead. :)
There's one thing that is not there in the streets: huge blue tubs with carps. In the Czech Republic, the very traditional Christmas Eve meal is carp and potato salad, and people like to buy the fish absolutely fresh. This means that there are carp-containing tubs in the streets, where sellers have their stalls. You can buy the poor animal alive and kill it yourself, or you can have it killed by the fishermen who sell it. (I prefer the second option, and, frankly, I think that the first option should be banned. People usually don't know how to kill the fish quickly, and in the end it's like animal torture really.)
Well, no surprise that in this turkey eating country, people do not buy fish like this.

6/ Santa's grotto in Arndale shopping centre
Oh yes, there was an enclosed space which looked like something between an odd-coloured Christmas tree and a rock: Santa's grotto. We haven't been inside, but there's allegedly Santa Claus inside, and if you have kids, you can pay approx. £5 to £10 per kid to visit the grotto.
There were also elves, guarding the entrance. I wonder whether it was a coincidence that the elves were young girls with revealing clothes, and the kids were usually accompanied by dads...
(Just for the record: in the Czech Republic, it is not Santa Claus who delivers the Christmas presents. Therefore, I have never done this as a kid.)

7/ Christmas markets
Installed up to 21 Dec, with huge sales on the last weekend. Full of people up to the last moment.
Interestingly, there was a huge hanukkah 'candleholder' just near the Christmas market.

8/ Total shutdown
This country went through an absolute, total shutdown just before Christmas. In the week starting 21 Dec, there were very little cars on the streets, and not many people in the streets. The buses were half empty. Many shops were closed, or were only open for few hours a day. On 24 Dec, which is supposed to be a normal working day here, I went to work, but apparently I was one of the few. Then we were kicked out of the office at 3 pm, which was a nice surprise for everyone but me - I had stuff to do, and wanted to stay until 4 pm!

8/ Christmas Day
...is 25 December. That's funny, because in the Czech Republic, the most important day is 24 Dec (it is a holiday, and presents are unpacked on 24 Dec in the evening). Therefore I am usually confused when people start talking about Christmas Day!
Anyway, absolutely nothing works on 25 Dec. No shops are open, not even the huge ones which are normally open 24/7. There are no buses, and no trams, and no transport at all.

9/ Ho ho ho!
Santa's signature laughter. Can be seen or heard everywhere, written on the shop windows, buses and city halls, and said by barmen, shop assistants, bus drivers, colleagues at work, and everyone. The first thing we have heard on 25 Dec morning was our neighbor next door saying 'Ho ho ho' loudly. The automatic cash desks in Tesco say 'Ho ho ho merry Christmas' even now. O_o

10/ Bah humbug!
If you are disgusted or tired of all the Christmas stuff around, or if you just want to be less mainstream, you can say this instead of 'Ho ho ho' (see above). Many people do. Many shop windows etc. do as well.

11/ Christmas jumpers
Everyone wears funny jumpers with snowmen, reindeer, Santa Claus, elves, elf clothing, Christmas trees, or (the most conservative people) Norwegian designs. This year, some people had Minions dressed as Santa on their jumpers. Sometimes, there are things attached to the jumper: for example, fluffy spherical objects which are supposed to resemble snowballs, or orange pointy things that should simulate snowman's nose, things like that. I have seen a guy who had a transparent pocket for a smartphone in his jumper, and the smartphone showed a fireplace with fire.
If you want to be less mainstream, you can wear 'bah humbug' jumper instead.

11a/ Christmas jumper day
We have had this in our office. Everyone is supposed to wear their ugliest finest Christmas jumper, and donate to Charity. I don't have any suitable Christmas jumper, but my husband has a Swiss jumper (which I gave his as a present when I returned from a skiing trip), and this jumper has some deer and things on it, so it qualifies as Christmas jumper, and I could wear that.
People obviously take this seriously, because when my boss arrived to the office, and found that there was a Christmas jumper day, he went to quickly buy one to the nearest shop.
You are not supposed to wear Christmas jumpers after 6 January.

12/ Ugly Santa near the city hall
There's an incredibly ugly Santa Claus on the main square. I hope it will disappear soon. If we are lucky, it will get damaged, burnt and destroyed during New Year's celebrations.

13/ Christmas cards
Everyone sends or gives Christmas card to everyone else. You send cards to friends, parents, colleagues, doctors, lawyers, customers, suppliers, subcontractors, business partners, neighbours, your dog, and the guy you've met yesterday in Aldi.
The cards are usually quite ugly, with some Christmas kitsch Christmas pictures and things. Sometimes there are (stupid) things written in the cards, and sometimes there is an empty space so you can write your own wishes there.
I myself only gave one real, paper Christmas card, to one of our secretaries who helps me a lot (and I wanted to thank her for all that). I have personally received zero paper cards, and a few e-cards. We (me and my husband together) got two cards from friends in the Czech Republic. Our landlady got approx. zillion cards, in coloured envelopes of funny shapes.
It seems that this card business is a-booming here, they have cards for, like, every occasion. Not only Christmas, but also birthday, weddings, childbirths, new jobs, retirements, moving your house, your kid's first teeth, everything.

All right, that's that. I am kinda glad that it's all over now... but I also hope that next year, I will be able to participate in all this like a real English person! :)