How to spend your birthday the least social way in a foreign country. Go to Manchster all on your own and do all the things you couldn't do with your newly acquired (but unfortunately absolutely useless when it comes to art and movies and everything that's not related to overly crowded shopping malls) friends.

So I went to Manchester for two days. What a dirty little chunk of a city! Narrow, dark streets, framed by old buildings, grey and heavy... yeah, that's the Northern Quarter. But let me tell you something; concentrated in this one single quarter you can find practically everything you never needed in your life but you know you want it and you're probably going to spend a lot of money on it. Records (you know those old things, before they got mp3s or CDs or tapes?), funky second hand clothes, lomos, munnies, design books, jewellery made of recicled cans, pocket books made of elephant poo and coasters made of old computer parts. They got it all! And the best thing - at least for me - they got a bunch of Vegetarian restaurants and cafes to choose from. I honestly can't even remember the last time that I actually had a choice what to order in a restaurant.

Manchester is a city full of diversity, that's for sure. It's loud and vibrant, lonely and depressing and it's got this arbitrary mix of Victorian and modern Architecture. There are some neat galleries worth a visit, like Urbis or the Richard Goodall Gallery, where I discovered the work of a wonderful American artist called Daniel Danger. While Urbis currently shows art by Emory Douglas, who worked as Minister of Culture for the Black Panther Party.

I had also planned to see China Town and get something non English to eat (c'mon, English food is well... English food). But I simply couldn't find it. I'm still wondering, how on earth could I miss a whole district?

All in all it was a quite interesting excursion.