By Carine Huurman, Erasmus University Rotterdam, The Netherlands

A famous expression is: “If it seems too good to be true, it probably is.” Two weeks ago, I realised how true this expression actually was. For a History student a museum that focusses on all kind of wars sounds really fascinating. For a shopping-addicted student it sounds really tempting to pay a visit to the Lowry. But to combine both seems too good to be true…
It started all with our trip to Salford on a rainy Saturday afternoon. Because of constructions on the road, we had to leave the bus close to the Old Trafford Stadion. On our way to the Imperial War Museum we met already a lot of Manchester United supporters. This should have been a sign for us. But unfortunately we didn’t really pay attention to the enthusiastic British people wearing red T-shirts and red scarfs.
The Imperial War Museum was absolutely worth-visiting, but done with museums for the day we decided to go shopping in the Lowry shopping centre and to experience a bit from Media City on our way.

So far so good. We had an enjoyable time at the shopping centre and we counted the time the football match probably would last. But when we decided to go back we met the first part of the crowd already in the shopping centre. And when we left the shopping centre and walked along the road there was already a huge traffic jam.

We decided to have a closer look at the stadium as we had to wait for our bus anyway But when we stood in front of the stadium and the cars were not really moving, we realised that we had a problem. As we expected our bus to be in the traffic jam as well, we got the “genius” idea to walk back to a bus stop a little bit further so we could catch a bus that would not have been stacked in the traffic jam and would probably be less crowded as well. So after around twenty/ thirty minutes we arrived at a bus stop that was empty. And there was no traffic jam on the road as well. There was only one small detail: We had already bought our tickets for the bus company that drove along the Manchester United Stadion and there was no other bus from the same bus company that would bring us home.
When we almost didn’t believe that our bus we would ever come, it appeared as in a dream. Altogether, it would have been a smarter idea to walk all the way back. But who cares: We had experienced a typical Manchester afternoon with rain, umbrella’s, road constructions, football fans and last but not least traffic jam.