There are moments when Manchester is like a much less intense version of New York. I could live here. The city is small and beautiful, and I’d been told its nightlife was legendary. Apparently the capacity of the bars and nightclubs in Manchester totals half the population of the city.

That stories of Manchester nightlife had not been exaggerated was obvious to me within hours of arriving in the city. Attractive bars and nightclubs were everywhere, and I witnessed a tramped up girl puking on the sidewalk before the clock struck ten.

Canal Street, the city’s gay village, didn’t disappoint either, even on a weeknight, when the scene is quiet but still impressive. Canal street stretches about four blocks, and one side of the street is nothing but gay bars all the way down (the other side is… a canal.) I’d say that, venue for venue, there are more gay bars in Manchester than Toronto, which is almost frightening when you consider that it has a population one sixth the size of ours. I hopped from one bar to another  and found the people friendly but the bars all the same. One guy I talked to confirmed this; there just wasn’t a lot of variety in Manchester.

This would drive me crazy if I lived here – imagine, my Toronto friends, if you had 40 bars to choose from and they were all Crews/Tango. But as a tourist I was happy enough to hop to the next place when I got bored, so I did, and after a short detour for a late dinner of crispy duck and fried rice, I made a friend and found myself in the middle of an odd sort of lover’s spat. Ask me about it later.

I wandered around for much of my second day in Manchester, and strolled through the Manchester Museum, which I found more interesting for its architecture than for its natural history exhibits that were mostly geared towards children and young students.

Then I wandered down to the Whitworth Gallery. Just as I was walking in a docent stopped me to tell me that, as part of the Manchester International Festival, the galleries had all been stripped of artwork to be used for performance art pieces in the evenings. I was welcome to wander around, but the galleries would have nothing in them except setups for the performances.

This is a perfect example of how not planning things out can work to your advantage. If I had known the museum was empty I never would have walked in. But wandering alone through the huge empty galleries with nothing but own imagination to help me guess how the random objects within them would be used in performance was far more interesting than a building full of paintings and sculpture would have been. A room full of chef’s whites, organized by size? Why? A bear skin rug on top of another bear skin rug? How come?

I made the mistake of going out for dinner with a couple other Canadians from my hostel. They were both nice guys, but I didn’t fly across the Atlantic Ocean to sit in an over priced pizza joint with some kid from Scarborough making inane conversation about the differences between Canadian and British money. The meal would have been a totally uninteresting wash had it not been for the awkward coincidence of one of our waiters being one of the aforementioned spatting lovers. The one who hated me. Ask me about it later.

Manchester really is a small city.