I’m on my trip back from Leeds to Japan, and stopping for one day in Manchester. The place I stay, the Britania, is fascinating, this is an old establishement, and it is clearly past its prime, and even its second. While the entrance hall has a large chandelier and a nice decoration, when you look close, everything is old and damaged. The room is quite small and reminds me of the old flat I had when I was a student or the flat where my grand-mother lived. Not exactly the feeling of a luxury establishement.

I took a walk in the streets of Manchester, but of course it rains and jet lags seems to have caught up with me. As I change time zones tomorrow, I don’t really feel like fighting it. Beside the fact that the Manchester center is one big construction site, the streets and the boutiques reminded me of one Douglas Adams joke, the Show Event Horizony, a phenomenon where all the shops are replaced by shoe shops and society collapsed. There are a lot of shoe shops in Manchester, and the whole place and my hostel in particular have a definitive feeling of decadance…