An image of Manchester

This is a picture of Manchester I took from my hotel room with the camera of my cellphone, during my last trip to the city. You can see on it The Palace Hotel in the background. Which is way more prestigious than the Holiday Inn I was in, but hey, I was not there to lodge in luxury hotels, but to do a long overdue pilgrimage. I have only been to Manchester three time: once to visit the first Anthony Burgess Foundation, the second time I literally walked through its train station to catch a train connection to and then from Liverpool (that really counts as one trip), and the last time. Many people told me that there was nothing to see there, that it was a gloomy industrial city. I have seen little of it each time, but the little I saw, I loved it. I am biased of course, since it is the birthplace of Anthony Burgess. Nevertheless, likes and dislikes are a question of subjective perspectives, and I loved its heart. As another kind of Northerner coming from a city that has the reputation to be ugly, I guess I do feel affinities with Manchester, even though it is a bigger city than the one I grew up in (and full of English people). Whatever the reasons were, I felt an affinity with it.