Geek Out Blog Post #1: Manchester!

 

WARNING: This will be a geek out blog post. You know I have to have at east one. Actually, you can pretty much count on my weekend posts being geek posts: this week Manchester, next week Doctor Who, and the final week Macbeth. So, why is Manchester a geek out post: Dominic Monaghan! If you are unfamiliar with that name, he played Merry in The Lord of the Rings (LoTR), and Charlie in LOST and Simon in Flashforward, and a bunch of other stuff, and currently has a wild life/travel show called Wild Things with Dominic Monaghan. I am a fan, so I decided to visit his home city. Well, Manchester became his home city when his family moved to Stockport when Dom (his nickname) was eleven, and stopped being his home city when he moved to L.A. shortly after doing the LoTR trilogy. That is why I also have a picture of the Stockport Station sign, because I got excited about glimpsing the town where he actually lived. Dom is also a huge Manchester United fan, so I was determined to buy a Manchester United T-shirt. And I am weird and like taking pictures in fitting rooms. So that’s where this was taken. I did buy the shirt though. Now I can be doubly hated back home in Missouri: I have a Cubs hat and a Manchester United shirt, but nothing Cardinals.

I absolutely loved Manchester. I suppose that makes sense, since it seems to be a college town and I generally like college towns. I’m a student; what can I say? But I was very, very impressed by the tram and bus service in Manchester. I don’t know if they always have help staff at all their tram stations, or if that’s something special for the festival season, but it made figuring out how to get around incredibly easy because there were always people in yellow jackets walking around, ready to give you directions. And bus drivers in the U.K. in general seem to know every street and every bus route, not just their own route, but the Manchester bus drivers remind me of the ones back in Champaign: very accommodating. I brought a map, but I really didn’t need to, and that is honestly the first time I can say that about a European city.

In addition to the Manchester United shirt, I went down town and visited the Whitworth Art Gallery, which is a modern art gallery, and went to see the play The Machine, written by Matt Charman and directed by Josie Rourke. Both were my kind of thing: modern and contemporary and not stuffy and old fashioned. Whitworth does have some Rembrandt and William Blake pieces, but much of their art is 20th century, including abstract wood and metal sculptures, which tend to be some of my favorites. They also have a really impressive collection of wallpaper, including a “Peter Rabbit and His Friends” wallpaper which you can actually view on the website http://www.whitworth.manchester.ac.uk/collection/wallpaper/. They also have a Walter Crane nursery wallpaper on display titled “Ye Frog Would a Wooing Go,” which almost reminded me of a comic strip on wallpaper, since panels, complete with descriptions, tell the story of Frog's wooings and his misadventures. Yes, this is the sort of thing I find fascinating. Unfortunately, I wasn’t allowed to take pictures while inside the museum.

The play was fantastic! I’ve seen contemporary plays at Southeast Missouri State University’s River Campus, but nothing like this. Is was funny, and tense, and the type of performance where I care about all the main characters, even though I know some of them have to lose. It’s a chess competition. You have a winner and a loser. You can’t get around that. Although, the end of the play does present a bit of a twist on that idea. This play is based off the historic game played between Garry Kasparov and a super computer. The venue was very intimate, with the stage in the center of the room and the audience seating all around in about 12 to 15 rows of seats. The only constant set piece was the table containing the chess board, computer, and country flags, plus the opponents chairs, and the whole production was presented as if we, the audience, were the live audience present at that match. The newscasters acted as the narrators. There was also a multimedia aspect to the production because large screens above the set broadcast the game, the way it might have actually been broadcast to the world. Those screens also provided visual clues for whose flashback scene was about to be presented (matrix for the computer's designer, static for the chess master), though, and were used in a variety of other way throughout the play. Granted, this type of play assumes the audience is going to be attentive, creative enough to figure out what is going on with very few props, is relatively well read, with exposure to a number of pop culture media (there are a number of references to literature and TV shows, with an X-Files reference being a favorite of mine), and so forth. It was very much a character driven and intellectual play, but I loved it for precisely those reasons.

 

And now, back to geeking out. I ate lunch as a very artsy type restaurant/cafe near the university campus called Cornerhouse. But the bigger sign, as you can see in this picture, reads “ArtFilmBooksFoodDrink.” I declined taking a picture of my meal, which was kind of vegetarian (stuffed portabello mushroom and a cucumber, apple, and pear salad), but it made me think of the sorts of food Dom sometimes posts pictures of on his Twitter. I felt all geeky just eating it. I tried to track down a road sign for Mancunian Way, so I could mimic this picture from Dom’s Twitter https://pbs.twimg.com/media/AzJK2slCcAAtc3P.jpg (yes, this is about as geeky as I get), but turns out that such signs are not that easy to find. I wound up just taking a picture of the area sign outside a park, just for mementos sake. And the, given Dom’s football fandom, and some of my British friends cricket fandom, and Dom has jokingly referred to American football as “handball” before, I just assume Brits don’t play the game. Apparently, I was wrong. The pub where I ate dinner was broadcasting BBC Sports and they were showing a European American Football game. What I found most amusing though, was that the stands were maybe half full and most of the people in the pub also didn’t seem to care about the game. I guess the world is trying to play the game, but world sports fans haven’t quite embraced it.

 

University of Manchester. It makes me think of Disneyland for some reason.

 

 

 Random Wall I Saw While Walking to the Museum

That is about the extent of my within Manchester trip information, but that’s not the end of the excitement. That’s right. Normally, I love train travel in the U.K. and even now it was still generally enjoyable, but we did have some excitement on the train shortly after leaving the Stockport station coming back. Six young men (they looked college age) got into a fight on the train coach ahead of mine. Two of the blokes resisted being removed from the train, so the police had to get involved. I don’t think anyone got serious hurt or anything, but rumor had it that some of them may have been more than a little intoxicated, so we were definitely a bit nervous about the whole situation. Plus, it delayed our train a half hour. Otherwise, the trip was truly a delightful vacation from the hectic school week and I would go back to Manchester anytime.

Two additional notes that I forgot to include yesterday: There were Northern Ireland flags flying everywhere in Manchester, and there were payphones (not the red London touristy phones, but actual payphones) everywhere, as well. Both features stuck me an interesting and odd. Just thought I'd share.