So, when I was walking around on the way to Rush (the night before my big sightseeing day), this nice older man saw that I was kind of looking confused around at street signs. So, he struck up a conversation with me. And he told me while in Manchester, the thing I *had* to do was go to John Rylands library.
If someone on the street is that excited to share something in their city, I’m gonna go.
So, the next day (when the library was open), I went. He told me it would be like Harry Potter. I’ve never seen Harry Potter, but I can say that library was magical!
I went into this reading room, and thought that was magical enough – but then there are just more and more floors and rooms. It like this adventure that feels like it’s never gonna end!
I will say, I didn’t give myself a *ton* of time for sightseeing… I had a hard time deciding what my deal with sleep was during this trip. Even though I like to imagine I’m super cool and impervious to jetlag, that didn’t necessarily seem to be the case this time around. So, first, I tried to get to sleep around 1am when I got back. But I couldn’t sleep.
So, by the time we reached 3:30 or so, I just tried to just stay up aaaaall night and into the day after my fun first night out.. Then I was just gonna try to stay awake during the day and then crash that night.
But that’s not at all how it went. As I got into the wee, wee hours of 8am or so, I couldn’t keep it together and I totally fell asleep. So, when I woke up in the early afternoon, I had to run around to fit everything in before businesses/museums and things closed around 5pm.
I went to the visitor center for the low down and the guy gave me a list – and that list, I followed. I went to this kinda secret (not that secret) library above a bank called the Portico Library. It was small and beautiful, and had a gigantic clock on one wall with a gigantic wind dial thing on the other. The librarian wasn’t sure why there was a wind dial on the other one except for that the library people were trying to keep up with the Jones’ libraries back in the day, and apparently it was pretty posh to know which way the wind was blowing.
Then I headed on over to Town Hall. Someone was getting married there, which I thought was interesting because I don’t know exactly how their politics mirror ours, but I haven’t seen anybody get married (like hardcore wedding married, married – like wedding party, kids everywhere, a bunch of guests, the whole she-bang) at City Hall.
I mean, then again, how often am I hanging out at City Hall? Not often. But anyway, it sounded like people like have full weddings at Town Hall over there, with the place reserved for them (or at least that was the vibe I got).
So, yeah, I saw basically the front hall kind of area of Town Hall and a bunch of dressed up kids kids who were being kept out of the ceremony running around (with adult supervision).
Agh! These posts go by so quickly. I still have more sightseeing to cover! But as this post is getting a bit long, I’ll just pick up here tomorrow!