Manchester is not only a great place to study English at the Manchester English Centre, but also a fantastic city filled with clubs, music, food festivals and just about every form of entertainment imaginable…
FOOD (LOCAL DELICACIES)
Black Pudding – Usually connected with Bury markets, these are long sausages made by boiling pig blood and oats together. Tastes much better than it sounds.
Barms – Also called cobs/rolls/muffins and a dangerous topic for conversation. It’s a bread bun that you slice in half to make bacon butties with.
Manchester Tart – A simple shortcrust tart made with raspberry jam and custard. No jokes about the name, please.
The Manchester Egg – Invented by Mr Ben Holden. A pickled egg wrapped in black pudding and sausage meat coated in a golden crumb. Give it a try. Everyone seems to like them.
Vimto – The purple nectar. For those hungover days.
Ostrich Burgers – Although ostrich is by no means a local species, you can’t live in Manchester without trying the outdoor food market, the highlight of which for me is the Safari Grill, a company who provide loads of different meats including ostrich, kangaroo and zebra.
Fish, chips and mushy peas with gravy – Now we know this makes our southern friends uncomfortable, but you have to face facts. Fish, chips and gravy is delicious. Deal with it.
FOOTBALL
It’s no secret that Manchester loves football. It’s home to two of the world’s biggest teams and one of its fiercest rivalries, so if you live here then you’d better get used to match days. This means three things- bursting trams on match days, foreigners asking for directions and old men trying to sell you scarves with weirdly pixellated pictures of player’s faces.
MARKET STREET
If it’s your first time in the city, you’ll learn that all human life is on Market Street- the fruit and veg man who’ll sell you two punnets of strawberries for a pound, the guys trying to unload balloons that I have never seen anyone buy, chuggers, living statues, street artists and the occasional woman trying to sell ‘lucky’ heather wrapped in tinfoil. Not to mention cyclists and Jehovah’s Witnesses. Eventually, all of these combine to change your afternoon from a relaxing shopping experience to some satanic version of Total Wipeout.
THE DEATH OF H
While this is more of a northern thing than something specific to Manchester, southerners are often confused to learn that the letter H is often missing in action. Old-school Mancunians will go up or down t’shop, t’garage and t’pub.