Manchester v Chelsea

It was my first weekend back in the UK and I was off on another last minute trip. This time it was up north to Manchester, the 2nd biggest city in the UK. More importantly, it's home to the Manchester United football team. That's soccer to all of us non-European folk.

See Pics: http://picasaweb.google.co.uk/bbergey/ManchesterVChelsea?feat=directlink

Manchester United is like the New York Yankees of football. One of the most popular football clubs worldwide with around 330 million supporters, their fans make up almost 5% of the world's population. This makes it extremely hard to get tickets, especially to a game against one of their main rivals in a heated race to be atop the Premier League. Fortunately, Hayley's dad has some great connections and one of them came up with two extra tickets to the game last Sunday. Better yet, he booked a hotel for us to stay in after the game as a early birthday present to Hayley. We started the four hour drive early in the morning and got to Manchester with plenty of time to have some lunch and meet the ticketholder at a local pub.

Man U's stadium, Old Trafford, is one of the premier stadiums in England and holds 76,212 spectators. The grounds, also known as the Theatre of Dreams, has been the club's permanent residence since 1910, with the exception of an eight-year absence from 1941 to 1949 following the bombing of the stadium in the Second World War.

For those of you that don't know the culture of European football, it's absolutely manic. The area surrounding the stadium quickly filled with thousands of people as gametime approached. Before the game, they lined up outside pubs waiting to get inside. They packed the streets and bought souvenirs and food from one of the many street vendors. Police on foot and horses kept everything under control, but it didn't stop fans from yelling at the opposition. Songs and chants were breaking out constantly, and everyone knew the words to everything. Entering the stadium was no different. Small groups started singing a chant, which would quickly catch on and spread throughout the entire grounds. Having the worst thoughts of crowd mayhem in mind, I was slightly surprised by how civilized things seemed to be. However, the small visitors section was lined by an unbreakable force of police to keep anything bad from happening.

The game was great! I was fully decked out in a brand new t-shirt and scarf and ready to show my Red Army pride. Unfortunately, our seats weren't together, but it didn't stop me from having a wonderful experience. The first goal, scored by Manchester, caused the grown man sitting next to me to give me a hug. Apparently my palm held in the air waiting for a high-5 wasn't good enough. We went on to score two more without the opposition scoring at all. It was an amazing game overall and the true Manchester fans were on a high for days. It's like the Yankees beating the Red Sox, or Oregon beating Oregon State. It was a big deal and I was happy to witness it.

After the game, we went back to the hotel to change and get ready for dinner. We took a cab down to the central area of Manchester. We had a huge Chinese meal in China town and then strolled down to Canal Street, a strip of bars and restaurants on a few pedestrian-only blocks along a canal. We finally headed back to the hotel as we were both wiped out and knew we had a long drive back Monday morning to get back to work.

On our way back the next day, we decided to take a slight side-trip to the Snowdome, an indoor ski/snowboard slope. It was actually quite impressive and filled with machine made snow. Escalator style belts take you up the hill so you can ski down the slope which is 170m long by 30m wide with an incline of around 1:7. You pay by the hour and rentals are included. Our hour of boarding was a lot of fun and I tried give Hayley some pointers while I practiced riding goofy. It was a good end to a great weekend!