Put a grotesque on it

 Good morning Manchester! Ah, what a lovely day! A good 10 hours of sleep, nice crisp weather of 53 degrees, no rain chance until 2:00 and all of the day to explore the city!

So we started our day off walking to the Manchester Cathedral. 601 years old, it is quite large and I loved the obvious love of music in all the little carvings and decorations.  I am totally digging all these old stone buildings and the decorative carvings on every available surface of the ceiling!

Like these musical angels that each had an instrument at the top of each pillar (these were just my faves). Makes me think of my little Hummel angels with their instruments! :)

This angel though... is playing the trumpet upside down. Is her hand upside down??

The angels have it nice being indoors though. This homely peasant gargoyle is not having a good time with the cathedral spiders.

Aaaarrgghhrrblgggrrrbbbblghgh!

Nearby the cathedral (which is most of Manchester as it probably takes about 20 minutes tops to walk all of downtown Manchester) we went to the Arndale Mall.  Jeff and I have forgotten what it's like to be in a mall that is still bustling and full of open stores and people shopping, but here in Manchester it was thriving! Two floors, two food courts, a "market street" within a store and even a camera store with exactly what I needed to get these photos off my camera. They have it all!

They even have delicious pasties and rolls, which we bought for our lunch:

(left to right) Sausage roll, cheese and onion pastie, traditional pastie, and meat and potato pie.

Since it's so easy to get to everything within Manchester, we dipped into our future plans on the itinerary and walked to the Manchester Science and Industry Museum! Porkopolis meet Cottonopolis!

Remember how in school you learn about the industrial revolution and cotton mills and child labor and all those terrible working conditions and injuries? That's this place! All the old machinery on display and each invention that usually improved the average worker's life (or made them have to work twice as hard now that product output was multiplied by new machinery). There was one grandfather clock on display that had two clock faces. The one on the bottom showed the actual time while the top face only advanced when work was being done as it was powered by the mill, so if people stopped working so did the clock, and they couldn't go home until that clock reached the end of the workday. Cripes the industrial revolution must have sucked for everyone! In fact, the symbol for Manchester that's everywhere is a bee, because they're worker bees with a hard work ethic and the city is a hive of activity.

Three cats

And true to our vacation theme, once our feet started getting tired we start talking about taking a rest and then get on a tram to a place all about standing and contemplating: The Manchester Art Gallery!

Small but definitely worth the visit, it had both classic and modern art, all donated to the gallery.

Okay, okay, our feet were really sore now, so we took the tram back to the station nearest the hotel and walked back. We rested our feet for an hour while debating what to have for dinner. What English culinary delight shall we try tonight??

Sushi

Fortified by a delicious dinner we walked back to the hotel, stopping at the convenience store Sainsbury for Cadbury yummies for dessert. We came back to our room to start this blog to discover the internet wasn't working! In fact, it's down on all 7 floors except for this corner of the lobby/bar area where we are now typing furiously, journaling while the memories are fresh for our future-selves' nostalgia and the entertainment of our friends and family back in the states who, bless you, read this for some reason.  It's for you we are in this cigarette smoke-y room with horrible, English 70s funk music being piped overhead. We do this all for you! Thank you and goodnight!

But wait! What does Jeff have to say about all this?

"After doing some thorough research on English Manor houses, I've determined they're damn near impossible to get to via public transit. But that tracks, because they're getaways for the Landed Nobility. Of course they'd be hard for the common folks to get to," me, this morning. 

Since this trip was originally supposed to be to Japan, we've been eating a lot of Japanese food (as seen above, where I am impatiently awaiting my food to arrive). The shop we went to tonight wasn't the best ramen in the UK, but if Scotland gains independence like it should, then this shop *will* be. 

While at the Museum of Science and Industry, we got a lovely refresher on the horrors of the workhouse and factory system in England (and the UK) during the early/mid industrial revolution. Since it was a museum for the general public and children, they glossed over the truest horrors, but even the ones they did mention were awful. 

[Sidebar: Dr Pepper (and most other sodas) here are a mix of Sugar and Aspartame, which is a crime against humanity. How am I supposed to caffeinate when I can't have the majority of the soda? The amount of tea I'd need to consume to compensate is... very high.]

[Secondary Sidebar: I just heard a 25ish year old man order two shots of Tequila Rose. He's not a middle-aged housewife and this isn't 1996, so I am at a loss.]

[Tertiary sidebar: This is Angie, reading about the Dr Pepper, to interject that the Pepsi here tastes different and is the only time I will say that Coca Cola tastes better than Pepsi. Thank you.]

Overall, today has been a lot of walking (but not as much as yesterday) and a moderate amount of tasty food. Also, I spotted a wild uwu outside the Manchester Cathedral. Let's see what tomorrow brings~!