Wondermere

Now those familiar with the English topography would claim that I have just made a spelling mistake in the title and it should be Windermere. Technically they would be right as that's how you would find it on the map. To my defense, I would claim poetic license to replace Winder with Wonder so that I can make it sound like a wonderful place and make the title catchy, that's it, no better reason.

Given that I really enjoy traveling and typically do a lot of sightseeing in new places it was surprising for me that I confined myself primarily to the office and my apartment for the first two weeks of my stay in Manchester, well, leaving apart a weekend trip to London. In keeping with the spirit of the trip though, I didn't do any sightseeing in London and just stuck to spending some quality time (read lazing around, watching movies, eating good food, having coffee by the window and bitching about others) with a couple of friends. And for some weird reason I was content! While I was in London I had almost decided that I will come back there the following weekend as well and do almost the same things over again. I think I just felt happy being in one of my favourite cities.

Anyways so I came back to Manchester and the week went by pretty quickly. My office is right next to the Old Trafford cricket stadium and walking distance to the Manchester United football stadium, which is pretty cool. Unfortunately there were no cricket matches being played in Old Trafford this month and despite my best efforts I couldn't find a ticket for a Man-U game. The closest I came to watching a Man U game was to see the fans, walking past me on my way back home after a hard day's work, to see the game against Villarreal. They were wearing the official Man U jersey which read AIG. I couldn't help but recall an email that I received earlier that day from a friend with an image attachment called "The New Man U Jersey" and it had AIG replaced with FED :-)

By the time Friday came I was almost set for another trip to London. I was trying to convince myself to stay back in Manchester so that I get to see the city more closely and take a few pictures as well. All such possibilities vanished when I looked up Lake District on the web on my colleague's recommendation. Next thing you know I was on a train to Windermere on Saturday morning, one of the towns and the main train station in Lake District. Windermere in many ways reminded me of Scotland... not as beautiful as Scotland but the closest I had come so far in England...
The forecast was of a cloudy and rainy weekend but we were pleasantly surprised to be treated with an almost rain-free morning and a warm and sunny afternoon. The trip included a small hike in Windermere, a lake cruise and a walk along the river on one of the smaller islands near Windermere called Ambleside. I also got to catch a local rugby game going on in Ambleside and being my first live experience of watching Rugby, it was quite cool. We managed to get lost in a 2 hour walk along the island but were able to make our way back in the nick of time to catch the cruise back to the town and eventually the train to Manchester.Sunday was equally whimsical as I got up and decided to go to Liverpool to catch an English county cricket match live between Lancashire and Somerset. Liverpool was just under 2 hours by train from Manchester and the match started at 12:30 so I didn't have to get up ridiculously early and could even manage a light breakfast before leaving home. I had to take a local train from the Liverpool train station to go where the game was. Finding directions to the stadium was a piece of cake as I simply had to follow the crowd getting out of the train. Buying tickets had never been easier - I walked into the stadium, there were two folks selling tickets holding a box like the ones used by lottery vendors in India... all tickets costed the same, no que, no seat numbers... open seating in the entire stadium, except in the pavilion which was reserved for players and some corporates. I walked into the stadium and was delighted to see that there was no fence. The seats started right from where the rope was and you could easily walk up to the pitch and the nets where the players were practising. You could easily talk to anyone, take autographs, pictures or whatever you wanted to do... there were kids playing with their own bat and ball on the ground! There were people of all ages watching the game and they were equally aware of the rules and the players' names and the nuances of the game. Every good shot was cheered and wicket applauded irrespective of whether it was in favour of or against the home team. In fact it took me a while to figure out which was the home team :-). Soon after, the hot water mugs came out, along with the tea bags and there it was... The old English way of watching cricket... nice sunny afternoon, the game of gentlemen and an elderly couple sipping a cup of English tea... and stopping every once in a while to record the events in their scorebook - Oh did I tell you that many of the spectators bring their own scorebooks for the game?

It was a close game with Somerset winning by three wickets and throwing Lancashire out of Division 1 for the next season. It was a bad day for Manchester in general as Man-U lost to Liverpool the same day - turned out to be Liverpool's first victory in an year! The highlight of the game for me was to watch Justin Langer and Marcus Trescothick walk in front of me while going in to open the innings (no one stopped me from walking up to the side-screen where the players entry was from) and then later when a ball hit for four came all the way towards me and stopped right at my feet - and I picked it up and handed it over to the fielder... I was thinking if it had been a game of Baseball, the ball would have belonged to me! Finders Keepers... :-)

The weekend after that, which was my last in UK, was again spent in London but I did manage to go out a bit in Manchester during the week. One of the trips was to the Asian neighbourhood in Manchester called Rusholme. On the surface you will find a lot of Indian restaurants there but almost all of them are run by folks from Pakistan and may be Bangladesh. In fact you will have a very tough time finding a genuine Indian restaurant in Manchester... I asked a few friends living there about it - they didn't know - and I wasn't surprised. On a similar note it's difficult to hail a taxi in Manchester without being greeted by a Pakistani driver and if you ever find an English or some other foreign driver, you can almost always feel the grudge they have against so many Asian drivers taking away their business and against their presence in Manchester in general. One of them was funny... he thought that I am from America as he found my accent to be American - this was a first for me :-)

In general I found Manchester to be a dull city, atleast when compared to London, but one interesting aspect of Manchester is the dress code parties or bar nights going on almost every day (these might be on specific days of the week but I didn't track it that well...). You could fine people walking on the streets dressed up really crazily to make you feel like its Halloween. The closer you are to the Univ of Manchester area, the higher the density of such folks and lesser their age. Apart from that, shops close pretty early and even restaurants are not open late in the night... as my gtalk status message used to say till a few days ago - The City Sleeps at 6! since I have been asked this question before, I would clarify, it's 6 pm not am :-)

More photographs to follow at http://picasaweb.google.com/himanshu.saraf