What Are They Doing?

Wow what a day! It snowed for the first time today and it was beautiful. This morning I was heading in to work on the bus and the day seemed as normal (although there was a strange man on the bus who obviously had a problem – he couldn’t sit down and picked up all the rubbish on the floor, even the smallest minute piece!) although I thought it was a bit chilly. I got to school at about 8:30 am and it was fine. I went in and unpacked and started getting organised for the day and I looked out the window and it was snowing! I couldn’t help myself, I ran into the staffroom and said “It’s snowing!”. Most people were as surprised as me. It continued to snow all day (unfortunately I did not have my camera so I have no photos) and it was like a postcard. There was about 10 cm of snow on the ground, the cars were covered and the trees were beautiful. As a lot of the students live further out than Royton, which is higher up in the hills, the school got closed and the students were sent home as the busses could not travel on the roads. So I left school at about 2:30 pm and threw snow balls with the kids on the way to the bus! By the time we got back into Manchester city nearly all the snow had disappeared but I am hoping it continues up in Royton overnight so I can take some pictures tomorrow!

Filed under: Travel

Tonight we went on our first pub crawl. We met up with Dhana and Craig and their friends Hannah and Chris. We started in Dhana and Craig’s local. It is literally at the end of their street. It was a very quaint, relaxing pub. There were only about 10 others and us in the pub! It is tradition to drink a pint at each pub (knowing I couldn’t do this, I had a 1/2).
We then continued on to the next pub which was very different to the first one. It was much larger and had people of a variety of age groups. We were treated to the vocal styles of a lovely woman and her backing tracks! She stunned us all with her ability to look like she was singing normally (lovely open mouth) but all the sound was coming out her nose! This pub had a lot of people that Dhana and Hannah call “eye-ya’s”. These are people who wear track suit pants and joggers all the time and start every conversation with “eye-ya”.
The next pub was again a total contrast. It was very old fashioned and was set out in little rooms with the bar in the middle. Each room had a kind of different feel. The other thing that I found really interesting was that this pub had no music - not even background music. Some of the rooms had T.V’s where people were watching the football but no music. In this pub they had a beer on tap that was made locally in Manchester and is a family run business. Aparently it is a nice drop if you enjoy ale.
The last pub we went to was what Dhana refers to as the football pub. It had a much younger crowd and quite loud background music! It also had pool tables that were very popular amoung the punters! This being our final pub some had an extra pint (yes for the men that meant 5 pints, that is 2.5 litres of beer!) and then we went our separate ways. Hannah and Chris headed into the city, Dhana and Craig headed home and we got a cab back to our place. It was a really good night and I would definetly do a pub crawl again - Tony says he will too but perhaps with a few less pints next time!!

Filed under: Travel

We saw that the show STOMP was coming to Manchester and we wanted to go, so we bought tickets. We could only get tickets to the Friday night show but they were good seats so we were happy. Thursday night we decided our plan of attack for Friday. I was going to come home from work and get changed, get the tickets and go back into town to meet Tony. We were then going to meet up with Sandra for a drink and a bite to eat before we headed out to the show. It was on at the Lowry theatre which is about 20 minutes out of the city centre by tram. So, Friday afternoon comes, I head into town from school, race from the bus down to the travel agents to pick up some info for our holiday then race back to the bus (this is where everything begins to go wrong). I am standing around waiting for about 20 minutes for the bus, getting impatient (as I know I am on a strict schedule). In the meantime Tony has met up with Sandra and I am still standing out in the cold waiting for the bus! They ring and just as I get on to a bus and they decide that I should just meet them and Sandra will drop us home to get the tickets. So I ride the bus for 1 stop and get off!! Yes, it turns out they were only 5 mins walk up the road from me all this time! We have a really nice catch up, Sandra drops us home and then our saga continues….
We head down to our local bus stop to catch a bus back into town to then get a tram out to the Lowry. We have never caught the tram before so we work out where we need to go, buy our tickets from the machiene and check when the tram is coming. It says 2 mins which was a huge relief as it was freezing. Then a tram came along, we jumped on it and were on our way, only to work out 15 minutes later that we were on the wrong tram heading in the wrong direction! The show was to begin at 8:30, it was now 8:15, you could say there was some tension between us on the ride back into town! We eventually got the right tram and were on our way. We arrived at our stop and walked like demons to get to the theatre. We arrived about 9:10. They were packing up food etc, we were hoping this mean’t that they had just gone in after interval. We hurried up the stairs, found our door and opened it up. We were greeted by the usher who says ” you do know the play is almost over”. We looked at each other and shook our heads. Then the usher said “Your tickets are for Friday 2nd December”. Tony said “Yeah…” The usher then says that we are a week early. Tony says “thanks” and we walk away feeling like fools. I have trouble controlling my laughter - this will teach us to look at our tickets!!!

Filed under: Travel

We would have never believed it to be so difficult to find a place to live.
When house hunting of course you need to have references to apply for houses, but it seems that Australia doesnt count! We also couldn’t believe that estate agents over here charge 141 to process your application, which doesn’t even guarantee that you will be approved. On our first house hunting day we found two really cute little flats in Northenden and a number of crap flats in other areas. We continued house hunting the next day to find a number of very average places. To cut a long story short we saw a number of places that were really not worth the money. The next trip we had we decided to walk the streets in a big rental area, looking for private land lords and other estate agents that had places that looked nice enough. It happened to be one of the coldest days we have had yet, and it rained non stop! We ramg a number of a private landlord that lived nearby. We went to his house and he was a little Indian man. He took us on a tour of the streets to see all of the flats that he had for rent. We almost laughed when we walked with him because he was making a funny noise - almost like he was chanting or constantly laughing slowly. His flats were really not what we were looking for and to top them off he told us that we should give him a figure for the monthly rent and he would decide whether he would accept it or not. Feeling very depressed about the house hunting, we decided to give one last call to an estate listed on the Internet. We arranged a viewing for Sunday with the landlord. We were anxious as we had had so much bad luck with the places so far. When the landord arrived, he actually had another flat to show us in the same building. This was a private rental. As soon as we got inside we were impressed! It is only a 1 bedroom flat, but it is quite livable and reasonably large. It is in a fairly old building but the inside has been totally rebuilt. Very modern. We knew that there was another person having a look at the flat after us, so we made it perfectly clear that we were impressed and that we wanted the flat. We applied first thing on Monday morning and FINALLY something went right for us. We got the keys on Tuesday and moved in later in the week.
We may not have bank accounts, or National Insurance numbers or a telephone but we do have a roof over our head.

Filed under: Travel