Well, of course, some things are better shared than done alone, and exploring a city together with a nearest and dearest must be one of the most exhilarating things one can do together (well, after exploring each other, of course).
But one of the main little naggings of discovering a unknown location (and I refer to city centres here) with a female is that they want to know where they are going.
Tze, and where is the sense of exploring of the unknown in that?
So, some things if a man wants to do what a man has to do are best done if the man does so on his own – apart from that there was no nearest and dearest on offer to do otherwise anyway.
So, true to whole generations of (stubborn/male) discoverers I left the hotel, walked straight for awhile, before I turned right and then just followed the next big road. Walking along I quickly noticed that Leeds is a mixture of at city centre that had an amicable amount of old buildings (certainly more than Birmingham can muster in the city centre), followed by large areas of redevelopment – at which I decided to turn back.
Well, not immediately, I sort of turned right and walked along a bit before I turned right again. By my excellent navigation skills I reckoned that by now I should be heading back to the hotel again. During my stroll I passed yet more nice buildings of various descriptions, including one that looked like a town hall (eg big, with lots of column and a big cupola on top – ok, it could have been a dome as well, I guess).
Trotting along, two things happened, a) I got increasingly hungry, and b) the area looked less and less likely that it would be in the vicinity of the hotel.
Back in the scenario of walking with your nearest and dearest this would be the time where she would start asking:
Why don’t you ask someone? - Because I am a man, doh.
So, ignoring the rumble in my stomach, the fact that it had gotten dark and that the people looked increasingly scruffy and rough, I peeked around corners, glanced up and down streets to see if I could see something looking vaguely familiar.
Not really.
Eventually I found a tourist board that had a map of the city centre and discreetly peeked at it while lightening a cigarette to see if I could get a sense where I was. I have to say I was quite chuffed when I saw that I was actually quite close to the hotel – basically less than 100 metres.
Approaching the hotel I realised that I had actually walked a big circle, as I came up to the hotel from the opposite direction than I had left some two hours earlier.
And when I was back in the room looking at the map the hotel had of course provided as part of their service I found out that I had managed to see almost all of the major sites in the city centre, the City Square, the Town hall, Millennium Square, Leeds Bridge, the City Markets, the Corn Exchange, the river, the Brewery Wharf.
Of course, if I had been in female company, I would have proclaimed an indefatigable sense of orientation rather than pure chance to have passed all the tourist attractions as I did.
But having done so, I have to say that Leeds seems to be a really nice city.
