"You Alright?" Is Not a Question
What Nobody Told Me Before I Moved to Manchester
Before I left Singapore for Manchester, people kept warning me about the rain. I grew up in Singapore, where it rains heavily and often, so those warnings never really landed. I figured the weather would be fine. I was mostly right about that part.
What I was not prepared for was everything else.
The Accent Problem Nobody Talks About
The first thing that genuinely threw me off was understanding people. I have lived an international life, I am used to different varieties of English, and I still struggled with some Manchester accents in my first few weeks. There were entire conversations where I smiled and nodded and had genuinely no idea what had just been said.
That gets better with time. You adjust, your ear tunes in, and eventually it becomes second nature. But I want to be honest with future students: it is a real adjustment, not a minor one, especially in the first month. Just be patient with yourself and do not be embarrassed to ask people to repeat themselves.
The Greeting That Is Not Actually a Greeting
The second thing that caught me out was being greeted with "you alright?" and quickly realising that is not an invitation for an honest answer. In Singapore, if someone asks if you are alright, they want to know if you are alright. In Manchester, "you alright?" means "hello." The expected response is "yeah, you?" and then you both keep walking.
I spent the first couple of months giving full answers to a question nobody was asking. It felt ridiculous in hindsight, but it also illustrates something real: even between English-speaking countries, social norms can be very different. The language is the same. The unwritten rules are not.
On the Weather, From Someone Who Has Never Experienced Winter
Singapore sits near the equator. There are two seasons: hot, and slightly less hot. The sun rises and sets at roughly the same time every day, all year round.
Nothing prepares you for November in Manchester, when it is dark by four in the afternoon. I had genuinely never experienced anything like it before. The seasonal shift in mood that comes with it is real, and I say that as someone who did not think they were the type to be affected by daylight. You will want to get outside during the daylight hours when you have them, and you will want people around you who are going through the same adjustment. Both of those things help.
The cold itself was manageable. Coming from Singapore I had no winter wardrobe at all, so buying that was its own experience, but you figure it out.
Why Manchester Is Actually a Great City to Be a Student In
Once I settled in, Manchester gave back. I live near Rusholme, which most people know as the Curry Mile, and it is genuinely one of my favourite things about where I ended up. The food, the atmosphere, the range of restaurants all packed onto one road. It is always an experience.
Whitworth Park and Platt Fields are close by and I run there regularly. The University of Manchester campus has that rare quality of feeling like its own neighbourhood inside a real city. You have the campus community and you have access to everything a major city offers, without having to choose between them.
The Friend Group I Did Not Expect
My friend group here is what I am most proud of from my time so far. We joke that we look like a university brochure because between us we cover so many different countries and backgrounds. Africa, Asia, America, the UK, everything in between. That level of internationalism creates a very specific kind of closeness. Everyone is figuring out the same place from a completely different starting point, and that shared experience of being new somewhere bonds people faster than I expected.
If I had one piece of advice for a student from Singapore or anywhere in Southeast Asia specifically: do not be put off by the cultural differences you have heard about. They are real but they are navigable, and they make you more adaptable in ways you will appreciate long after you have left.
Manchester was not the culture shock I expected. The real adjustments were smaller and stranger than anything I had anticipated. And they were completely worth it.
- Alexis
