Manchester: Strolling, SkeptiCamp, and Silly Trivia

Hello again, Blogonauts!

Well, the fleet flyers of Aer Lingus have ported me nimbly across the Atlantic Ocean & the Irish Sea. The first stop this time is Manchester, England.

After an early night to help ease my jet lag (followed by a hefty morning breakfast), I headed out to explore the city. My friend Zoë has described Manchester as "gritty." It certainly has an industrial past. The textile mills here reportedly were filled with hives of workers, and the city adopted the honeybee as its symbol to represent the buzz of activity around those factories.

Here are a few photos I took while out ambling.

Piccadilly Square, seen from the hotel's breakfast room

Queen Vicky, with my hotel in the background.  


Statue of Frederic Chopin
Manchester Cathedral
Manchester Cathedral's Pipe Organ, looking toward the Choir.

John Rylands Library

Combination of old & new architecture


Manchester proudly highlights its Gay Village on city maps.

Chinatown also gets some of the spotlight

Beginning in late morning, the conference staged "SkeptiCamp," a series of sixteen 10-minute presentations on a variety of topics. Even though the presenters were volunteers, they nonetheless shared info in which they are enthusiastic experts. Plus, they had precisely timed their talks. I've seldom seen such self-containment at a conference. The participants (about 125) were encouraged to ask questions via a smart-phone interface, so the heckling was kept down to near zero. The event took 4 hours, but it was never boring, and often genuinely intriguing.

(The last presenter is an attorney working on prison reform in the UK. In order to raise money for that cause, she ran 34 miles from Liverpool to Manchester, making it just 30 minutes prior to her scheduled talk.)

Later in the day, the conference had organized a Pub Quiz, with about 80 people competing in teams of 4. I joined a team of two Brits and an American ex-pat who has lived in the for a dozen years. We didn't win, but we seemed to have done better than the average.

Tomorrow the main conference begins in earnest. I expect the fun and fascination to continue!

Blog to you later!


Location: Piccadilly Gardens, Manchester M25 0HG, UK

Comments

  1. John Andersen WursterSeptember 22, 2023 at 7:35 PM

    Thanks for introduction and photos of Manchester, where I've never been before . Sydney Australia and Montreal PQ have that same statue of Vicky. Was Chopin ever in Manchester ?

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. AnonymousSeptember 23, 2023 at 5:43 AM

      Great comment, John! Chopin visited and performed in Manchester in 1848.
      https://aboutmanchester.co.uk/new-exhibition-celebrates-fryderyk-chopins-1848-concert-in-manchester/

      Larry

      Delete
  2. AnonymousSeptember 24, 2023 at 8:50 AM

    Great photos. They really show old and new side by side which is peasing to me. I like the Chopin statue too! Anna V

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Thanks for taking the time to comment. Please leave some indication of who you are, either by name or a known alias. :-)

Popular posts from this blog

Serfdom to Soviets: Estonian Farms

Image
  An Estonian serf family home, circa 1800. Hello again, Blogonauts! We haven't left Tallinn, but we have slipped momentarily away from the city center. Today I spent much of the day wandering the grounds of the Eesti Vabaõhumuuseum. (Say that 3 times fast! Heck, say it even once slowly!). Rest easy... I'll save you the trouble. That particular bowl of alphabet soup translates into the Estonian Open-Air Museum . It's a luscious mixture of woods and fields nestled alongside Tallinn's bay, and this vast park holds dozens of relocated farm buildings from many parts of Estonia (and covers many eras of its agricultural history). But this is no haphazard collection. Each set of buildings has been curated to show how a farm family would have lived over the last 300 years. (The exhibits even carry visitors forth through the era of Soviet collective farming.) Let's highlight a few. The building above dates from the early 1800s and served as both the family's primary home...
Read more

I'm Tallinn for Estonia!

Image
  A portion of Tallinn's old town skyline Hello again, Blogonauts! Let me invite you to join me in the small country of Estonia, and its capital, Tallinn. So where are we? As you may know, three former USSR states (Lithuania, Latvia, & Estonia) edge the Baltic Sea. Estonia is the northernmost of that trio. I joined a 2-hour group walking tour today to see much of the old town. In a way, I'm channeling the tour guide (a Londoner now married to an Estonian) to give some of the stories that help to explain the pictures.  So back to those stories: While Estonian culture is centuries old, the Danes, the Swedes, the Germans, & the Russians have each fought to rule over this land. Estonia's existence as an independent country is therefore relatively modern...really only around 100 years, with an enormous Nazi-&-Soviet-filled gap in the middle. The skyline photo above, though, points to medieval history. Stone parapets, medieval towers, earthen ramparts, and even the re...
Read more

Finagling Finland

Image
  This little tugboat carried me & a thousand companions from Tallinn to Helsinki Hello again, Blogonauts! Oh, the headlines I considered for this post!    Beginning With A Big "Finnish"    Hell not floatie, Hell sinkie!    This Is Another Finn Mess I've Gotten Myself Into! So you can thank me that I spared you the pain of those puns (...or did I?). At noon on Monday the bedazzled barge "Finlandia" embarked across the Baltic, baring me and bundles of vagabonds bound for the cloudy, windswept harbor known as Helsinki. I had worried a bit about becoming seasick, but that was never a threat. Instead I whiled away the time planning my 3-day Finnish foray while pretending I was eating at the cafe in IKEA. I'm sure I've eaten something similar in IKEA's cafeteria.   I trammed & toddled my way to my hotel. But then, time and daylight were wasting! After quickly stowing my luggage in my room, it was my moment to orient myself to the...
Read more