We arrived in Manchester, England yesterday afternoon in time to do a quick check-in to the former cotton warehouse and now a uber-modern hotel called Roomzzz Aparthotel Manchester City. Very Ikea-meets-Asian-Zen-master inside. Great mattress, perfect pillows and what is that duvet made of? Perfect weight and not as poufy as most. However, the form doesn’t quite meet function when we hit the bathroom. The sink has one of those groovy waterfall faucets over a the now-classic white bowl of a sink sitting up on the little tabletop. Should be good right? And it really does look stylish until you turn on the tap. The design means that water is splashed from here to eternity. There’s nowhere to put the handtowel and the soap just slides around on that little tabletop because there’s no dish. We easily remedied that by grabbing a dish from the very cool and nicely appointed kitchen area. And that complaint aside, the free wifi on the big screen tv is a great touch.

We met up with Emma Fox from Show Me Manchester for a quick tour around the U.K.’s third most visited city (London, Edinburgh, Manchester). She was lovely but the wind was cold and very chilling and we wrapped it up so we could do a little exploring inside some of those lovely buidlings. (Note to self, always keep the merino hoodie handy).

Dinner was at the packed Japanese restaurant Sapporo Tepanyaki where the stations had the requisite knife-flashing, egg-tossing chefs who delighted in surprising their audiences. There was a lot of squealing and oohing and aahhhhing.

We finished off our night at the Cloud 23 bar. The Hilton Manchester Deansgate at 41-stories, is the tallest building in Manchester. The first 22 floors is all hotel rooms up to this bar floor on the 23rd floor and then residences above that.

All the stiletto-heeled, bling-wearing beautiful young things looked a little askance as our group was led to the front of the queue to blast up for our drinks.  There are definitely some advantages to traveling on a press junket, though admittedly those people looked a lot snappier than our group where function, as in comfortable walking shoes, really does often take precedence over form…

But then, not always having the perfect outfit is a small price for having a great cocktail while sitting in a crimson lipstick chair at the top of the world.