We just spent 25 minutes writing up a really detailed writeup of our absurd day in Manchester, and then I accidentally deleted it. I don't feel like typing it up again, so here's a quick itemized list of the highlights.
- Seeing someone barf all over the sidewalk as soon as we got done checking into our hotel.
- Having a crappy lunch and being forgotten by the wait staff as we tried to get a check for a half hour.
- Realizing that our hotel was utterly disgusting and trying to find other things to do to stay out of the hotel room, but failing.
- Witnessing street crime.
- Eating one of the worst dinners either of us has ever experienced.
- Oh god, the streetbarf is still not cleaned up 6 hours later. Avert your gaze!
- Trying to go to sleep at 9pm to end our ordeal as quickly as possible, but being kept up by our hotels thin walls and the drunken mobs outside.
- Taking two dramamines each to pass out through the noise and only waking up once overnight when it sounded like someone kicked over a trashcan full of hubcaps in our ceiling.
- Waking up at 7:00 am and checking out without showering (ugh, that hotel bathroom) so we could get to the station as quickly as possible for the earliest train to Edinburgh.
Addendum:
It really isn't fair to give so little detail about our hotel stay at the Eazy Sleep in Manchester. A couple sentences simply cannot do the experience justice. So allow me to elaborate...
Upon checking into the hotel, we received our first sign that something was amiss almost immediately. We had a rather difficult time just opening to door to get into the room because something was jammed against the door from the inside. It turned out to be a painting that was laying face down on the floor, though it presumably had not just fallen off the wall because it appeared as though it belonged above the bed on the opposite side of the room.
After dislodging the painting, we continued inside and quickly realized that the room had quite a few other shortcomings. Aside from being tiny, there was a large hole in the wall (that looked like a human head had smashed into it), the bed had a purple sequined pillow with hair stuck in it, and only 2 of the 6 lightbulbs in the room & bathroom worked. The carpet looked disgusting, and as a result I never took off my socks at any point during our stay. The bathroom had mounts on the wall for a towel rack, but the bar for the rack was completely broken off.
Later in the day, we tried to enjoy some TV and internet time to take our minds off the room's other flaws. The hotel advertises free wifi, but no Eazy Sleep network seemed to exist. Then we noticed that there was no TV remote anywhere in our room, and the TV had no buttons on it so it was impossible to use. I took a trip to the front desk to try to resolve these issues. When I asked about the internet, the clerk asked what room I was in, and then informed me that the internet probably "won't work over there" by room 17. I told him we had no remote for the TV and he said he'd be over in two minutes to resolve that for us.
A half hour later, he'd never come with our remote so we decided to go out again. I stopped by the desk on the way out to remind him and he was just sitting around reading a magazine. An hour or two later we returned to the room and found that he had indeed left us a remote during our outing. Turning on the TV, we soon wished the remote had remained missing. Every channel skipped and cut out every few seconds so it was impossible to hear more than 5 words at a time from anything. It became so frustrating that we gave up on TV entirely after a few minutes.
With no TV, no internet, and a tiny room, we had no real options left except to try to get to bed early. It was at this point that Maggie discovered a half empty 2-liter bottle of Coke next to the bed. "Want some Coke?" she asked. Evidently the maid service isn't particularly thorough. We took our dramamine, I put on some sweatpants and left my socks on so as to have as little of my skin touching the bedding as possible, and laid down to give it a shot. Even with dramamine, there was a formidable amount of noise to overcome before sleep was possible. First off, we'd noticed in the afternoon that the toilet in our room flushed for an incredible amount of time. It seemed to continue flushing and making noise for 3-5 minutes. And the plumbing was so potent and the walls so thin that any time another person in an adjacent room flushed their toilet, you had the pleasure of listening to it run for the next 5 minutes as well. An even greater din on the street was trumping the near constant (and appropriate) flushing sound, though. Drunken pub-goers adorned the sidwalked outside our room, shouting and laughing without end. We heard a bunch of them spending a solid 35 minutes trying to organize a group photo under our window, presumably because there was a lovely street lamp there that made it as bright as day outside our window at all hours.
Foruntately the drugs kicked in after a little while and we outdueled the noise and light and fell fast asleep. As mentioned above, we were jolted awake once around 6:00 am when it sounded like someone had kicked over a trashcan full of hubcaps in our ceiling. When I awoke for good an hour later, I discovered to my mild horror that part of the bed sheet had come off near my head and there was a large burn hole in the exposed area of mattress. I turned on the TV to check for a weather report, and the channels were still skipping too much to get any information from the news. I was beginning to consider drinking some of that coke beside the bed. But instead we both dressed quickly and ran the hell away to the train station.