Desserts, desserts and more desserts!

A restaurant that only sells desserts? Sounds incredible.

Up until a year ago it was very rare to find a restaurant that sells only desserts. Recently, people have been shocked by the amount of dessert restaurants that have been opening. This article by the MEN talks about how desert cafe MilkJam first opened their store and the unique desserts that they include.

Being a student myself, craving a dessert is more of a regular occurrence than you would think. From insane milkshakes to 12 inch cookie doughs; Manchester has it all. Manchester has so many choices of dessert bars to visit, a simple look on trip advisor is not always student friendly. For me, I had two major necessities when it came to picking what dessert restaurants I wanted to eat at: cheap as chips and as close as possible.

My Favourite Desert Places: 

Black Milk – Black Milk, originally a cereal bar, now offers a range of desserts. The milkshakes are my personal favourite. Although they start at £4.95, once you start adding on cookies, whipped cream, marshmallows and all the other goodies available the price can start going up to £10.

Milkshake from Black Milk

 

 

Ice Stone Gelato – Located directly opposite Manchester Metropolitan University, Ice Stone Gelato is the perfect place to spend your 2 hour break between lectures. The most intriguing part about Ice Stone Gelato is the numerous ice cream flavours that are on display. It’s almost impossible to walk past with out being attracted to the brightly coloured ice cream.

Ice Stone Gelato 

Flurries and Shakes delivery via JustEat – Now, this is the perfect lazy student dessert. Sitting in your flat in your pyjamas and wanting to go out is always a struggle. However, I found the perfect solution to this – simply order from JustEat.

Flurries & Shakes delivery from JustEat 

In this article written by The Independent, it talks about the ‘craze for dessert-only dining is growing.’ I think that the dessert restaurants are going to continue growing and they will begin to rival each other as more in the same area start to grow. Who doesn’t want to enjoy a delicious desert every now and then?

A map of how to get to my favourite dessert places from Manchester Metropolitan University:

Most Definitely Famous Burgers

Burgers are what dreams are made of. You can have almost anything on a burger, the possibilities are endless! So, when I first moved to Manchester, I knew that I wanted to visit as many burger restaurants as possible.

Returning to reality

After doing my research – to make sure that I only visit the best burger restaurants in Manchester – I came across an article written by the MEN. The article was about people voting for their favourite burgers in Manchester. I was quite surprised to see that a restaurant called Almost Famous won by a mile.

You might be asking yourself how did Almost Famous beat out legendary burgers such as Byron’s Burger, Five Guys, Tib Street Tavern and Solita?! Well, I was asking myself the same question. I quickly explained to my friends how we needed to experience Manchester’s greatest burger for our selves.

From looking at Almost Famous’ website, we found out that the restaurant was in the colourful area of the Northern Quarter. Being new university students, we still had a lot of exploring to do in Manchester and when we arrived at the Northern Quarter we were not disappointed. Filled with restaurants and bars, we eagerly looked around to see what restaurant was Almost Famous. Amongst all the quirky restaurants, we noticed a small narrow staircase. As we walked up the staircase, we were engulfed into the world of Almost Famous.

The first thing we noticed was how congested the place was. There was people everywhere. As we were led to our table, we noticed that the staff were all dressed in quirky patterns – we were not cool enough to be eating in here. I swear as we all glanced at the menu, we squealed with excitement. There was SO many options. At first look, I was drawn to the Vinny Chase burger. It consisted of a ‘double double juicy burger, American & Applewood cheese, streaky bacon, trailer trash onions, magic mayo, Winning ketchup, Marmite butter, served on a pretzel bun.’ However, after realising I’m a small 5 ft girl and could not possibly eat that much. I decided to go with the Triple Nom burger. At only £9, you get ‘Cheese, pulled pork, coleslaw, Redneck BBQ, Famous sauce‘ – amazing. Not only was there such a large array of burger types, even the chips were from another planet. We went with the ‘winning‘ fries with had a mix of normal fries and sweet potato (only £2.50!). However, if sweet potato and normally fries aren’t your thing, they also have fries that include bacon, pulled pork and much more.

When the food arrived, we were pleasantly surprised by the portion size. It was huge. The burger that I ate was indescribable. The meat was cooked to perfection and the barbecue sauce was simply divine. After plenty of ‘oh my god’ and ‘this is insane’ comments, we were finally finished eating our food.

On the way out, I asked a staff member ‘What do you recommend we do before we leave?’ and he replied with ‘Write your name on the bathroom wall! It’s a tradition we’ve been encouraging for a long time.’ So that was exactly what we did.

Edgy atmosphere

Joining in with the tradition

Other than the food, this was my favourite part about the restaurant. The graffiti wall made added to the whole ‘edgy-ness’ of the restaurant and added to the feel that we were in another world. Holly and I decided to write on the wall something that we would remember for the next time we visited. Holly, an obsessed Adele fan, written ‘Hello…Holly’ and I decided to write ‘Taylor UTB’ as a hint to my home town, Middlesbrough.

 

On the way out, we walked down the small staircase and seen a bright neon sign that was directed us back to ‘reality’ of the Northern Quarter. It was a surreal experience and I recommend every one to visit. It truly was the best burger I have ever tried.

Tourist Places in Manchester

Roadworks on Oxford Road

For one of the busiest roads in Europe, it is important for the transport through out the road to be as quick and efficient as possible. The new ‘groundbreaking investment‘ is going have a dramatic change on both cyclists and bus users on their daily travel. Both cyclists and bus users will be able to have their own priority lanes.

As many who live in Manchester will know, there has been constant ongoing roadworks all the way down Oxford Road. The roadworks have caused major delays in peoples daily commute to work and university. The reason for the chaos is due to the new bus lanes being created – this will help with the congestion issue on the road. Road users have been advised to use this map to help guide them on the new permanent changes that are happening.

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How Journalists Use Social Media

How Journalists use WhatsApp and Instagram

With the Internet and social media both evolving so quick, it is proving to be hard for journalists to not be active online.

Not only can we as journalists benefit from social media by finding stories and sources online, it can also be a good instrument for us to engage with audiences. The instant messaging app WhatsApp is rising to the top of peoples most used apps – As reported by Statista.com, the app had over 1 billion users in February this year.

Now, you may be thinking, of what interest does an instant messaging app have to a journalist? News site On Our Radar reported how in Sierra Leone, citizen reporter Amjata Bayoh interviewed a man, Osman Bah, who had four brothers had fell ill from deadly disease Ebola. Bayoh communicated with Bah only through WhatsApp. The audio featured below is what Osman Bah had sent to Bayou through WhatsApp.

https://soundcloud.com/bbc-world-service/ebola-i-dont-want-any-other-family-to-experience-what-i-have-experienced

Radar’s editorial manager, Paul Myles, discussed with firstdraftnews.com that ”recording over the phone line would have been much harder” and that ”if he tried to record over another app the source probably wouldn’t have had it, so the fact he had WhatsApp meant we were able to do that interview.”

Although we can’t use WhatsApp to search and find stories the way that we can use Twitter, it has proven that it has large global reach. If one in every seven people in the world have the app downloaded, how can it not be valuable to some extent to us as journalists? Not only is it easy accessible, everyone can use it.

When I think of Instagram I think of photos of peoples most recent trip to Nandos or their Starbucks coffee cups. So, for a social media app that consists of only photos, I imagine newsrooms wonder about how Instagram could be valuable to them. Instagram is often over-looked as it doesn’t drive traffic the way that Twitter does.

An article written by Katie Hawkins-Garr for the poynter.org suggests that newsrooms could use Instagram to tease long-form reporting. The article mentions a journalist called John Stutter, who uses his Instagram to document places and people he sees along his travels. He later uses the photos and incorporates them into his long-form stories. Another way that Instagram has proven to be useful is to showcase photography by photo journalists. Large news organisations such as National Geographic are doing particularly well on Instagram – with an impressive 61.7M followers.

I think that I could benefit by using both Instagram and WhatsApp. Using Instagram would allow me to connect with a different kind of audience. Posting original photos that could be followed up with a story could give people of a more creative mindset a look into the news. A way that I could take advantage of WhatsApp is that I could use it to connect with other journalists and collect further information from sources.

Moving to Manchester

Leaving home, making friends and getting drunk

Moving to Manchester was something that I found very daunting to me. Coming from the small rundown town of Middlesbrough, the big city was a huge adjustment. I excitedly arrived in Manchester an early Saturday morning excited to unpack all of the new home ware that I had spent hours searching the internet for. After unpacking and realizing that I had yet to buy numerous essentials for my university life, then came the dreaded family goodbyes.

Imagine having a small five year old child crying at your feet begging you to come home. I would be lying if I said that I didn’t shed a tear or two as I hugged my little sister goodbye. Despite me being in such an emotional state, I was not going to let that stop me from going out and enjoying myself.

I would consider myself to be the kind of person who is quite shy but extremely loud when you get to know them. After going over and over in my head different ways that I could introduce myself, I decided to brace myself and enter the ever so terrifying common area. I was pleasantly surprised to see a tall blonde girl sat on the sofa with a cup of tea and chocolate digestives. She was quick to introduce herself and show me her stash of alcohol that she mentioned she would ‘happily share’ – that’s definitely my kind of friend. That night we found ourselves making friends with all different kinds of people at a flat party. I noticed that already I felt so much confident in such a small space of time. I instantly knew that moving away was 100% the right choice for me. Partying until 6 am was certainly not what I was used to, however, I was glad that my two weeks of freshers had begun.

As I arrived a week before I was due to start my induction week at Manchester Met, I found that I had a week to make friends, explore the city and get drunk (without having to wake up for a 9 am lecture). Making lists for what freshers events are on when, thinking about how we can go out with spending the least amount of money and meeting new people everyday are all things that I miss already.

This first week was definitely a week to remember.