Splitting up

 Manchester - trip 3, week 3

Hanging with Alan Turing

Craig and Yolanda split up in Frankfurt - Yolanda home to Thunder Bay, Craig on to England. He flew into Manchester, which has a considerably bigger and better-connected airport than Liverpool. He decided to spend the day seeing some sites in Manchester before carrying on.  The city is divided into "quarters" that are descriptive of the usage/history of the locations. More on the Medieval Quarter next post. Upon arrival, Craig checked into his hotel in the Gay Quarter, and, it being Saturday night, soon discovered that "gay" is used in the current sense. It also turned out that a trans festival was happening in a nearby park, something like a Pride event.

The park containing said festival is notable as being the location of the Alan Turing memorial - he became a professor at the University of Manchester after inventing computers and saving the world from Nazism - solving the problem of how to break the Enigma machine's enciphering technique. Then he was discovered to be a homosexual, had his security clearance revoked, and forced to choose between "chemical castration" or jail. He chose the former but committed suicide a few years later and wasn't pardoned for his "crime" until 2013.