Day two and we're up at 5am, at breakfast by 7 and ready to rock and roll by 8am - we grabbed a couple of metro ticket day passes for the tram and caught one to Victoria Station.

We wandered around the streets and saw some lovely old buildings like the Cathedral Church and Chetham's School of Music.

We went inside the Cathedral and wow, I've never seen anything quite like it - huge ornate stone fixtures and sculptures, wraught iron and stained glass windows - words can't quite do it justice. We stopped for a quick coffee at the old Wellington before moving on.



Lots of fountains and other interesting architecture around Manchester - an interesting mix of the old and new, intermixed quite seamlessly. I took the first of many panoramic photographs in the square near the Cathedral church, click here for a 360 degree Quicktime VR view (caution: file is large: 3.5Mb)!

BT have an amazing array of phone booths in and around Manchester (probably everywhere actually) with not only pay phones, but text messaging (SMS) phones, internet access phones, etc - all inside phone booths! Wouldn't catch me using one for quids though.



Back into the city again and we visited inside the John Rylands Library - a 100 year old neo gothic church like building purpose built by Rylands for his library. Amazing stuff, once again - it took 10 years to build. Wow. Talk about high ceilings!



We walked around some more, the doorman at the Rylands suggested we might like to take a look at the "Hidden Gem", St Mary's church which was just around the corner - so we did - unfortunately no cameras were allowed so we didn't take any pics of this wonderful little church.

Next we spent a few hours at the Science Museum and took a photo of the UEFA cup which was on display there. Lots of interesting stuff to look at, we walked through the sewers of Manchester (well, a mock up thereof) and learned a bit about the Manchester - Liverpool railway.



Lunch back at the Hotel in "The Overstuffed Pizza" - half price pizza's so we paid £7.95 for a 12" pizza, OJ and my third beer, an Italian Peroni Red. Cheap meal by UK standards! What is it with Brits and their love of sauces?



After lunch, we had a rest until 4pm and went to the Manchester Art Gallery so Kaye could see a Constable, of which we saw two (along with a Turner and many others). The Constable was small and not very "clear", but the Turner was much better.

After the Art Gallery closed at 5pm we went for a tram ride out to Bury, the last stop on one of the three main tram lines. The trams are actually dual mode, inside the city they operate as trams, but outside the CBD they're a pseudo train - and get along quite quickly (albeit very rickety).

It was after 5 so the tram was crowded with commuters, and once we got to Bury, there wasn't anything of interest still open (including the Mill Gate shopping mall and world famous bury markets (famous?!?).

We caught the tram back to the city and did some shopping for drinks at Marks and Spencers - where we found "theme chocolate" - I had to take a pic of that for Pauline, sorry poohbear, I couldn't bring it home for you :)



It was time to go hunting for food again so we wandered into Chinatown to see what was on offer - we found a lot of expensive, grotty looking places but finally stumbled across a very nice restaurant called China City - which had a nicely priced menu (quite reasonable) as well as looking half-clean.

Turned out to be a great place with good food and great service - lots of chinese people eating there, usually a good sign :)



The manager was a happy chappy who immediately recognised our accents as Australian (a relief, as everyone else that day had us pegged as yanks) and offered me a Castlemain XXXX beer - LOL - I politely declined and asked for something different. Tsing Tao was offered and accepted - a nice mild beer!

Dinner was great, as usual we ordered too much food, surprised the waitress by asking for chop sticks and surprised her even more by then using them properly. The meal was nicely capped off with chinese green tea.