Not just in Leeds but in Yorkshire in general. I am a Mancunian, not a United fan, but cultural programming dicates that I'm not really meant to readily hand out compliments to our Yorkshire counterparts. Well, I don't care when it comes to fish and chips. The fish tastes like fish in Yorkshire, not like white rubbery stuff in batter we get over here, and the chips melt in the mouth. How good are the chippies once you get past Rochdale? I simply don't eat fish and chips in my own city any more, I wait for my trips to Yorkshire instead. The ones next to the Chemic Tavern in Woodhouse and tucked down a little side street close to the Skyrack pub in Headingley are particularly good.

A chippy on every street - or so it seems.

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This is one of the loveliest places in Barcelona to hang out and daydream. Strictly speaking, the Bar del Pi is just off Placa del Pi in Placa Sant Josep Oriol. Bar del Pi features art donated by locals over the years and has always been a bohemian hangout popular with an over-25 crowd.

On Sundays in the square, there are often art fairs and you can buy yourself a comic from the legendary Makoki comic shops - I recommend 'El Bueno de Cuttlass', a hilarious stick cowboy who has a girlfriend called Mabel and an obsession with Kraftwerk.

The old town to the left of the Ramblas. If you stand at the entrance to Liceu Metro station, facing the Colon statue, and turn left down the nearest side street, you'll find the Placa del Pi. Otherwise, it's reachable from the other end from the Cathedral.

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I must warn you before you read this that I am a Manchester City fan and my worldview and my choice of Corinthians is directly influenced by this. Corinthians is perhaps Brazil's best-supported club, unless you ask supporters of Rio de Janeiro's CR Flamengo, the club of Zico.

Corinthians, nicknamed 'Timao' were actually given to me by someone I chatted to about which team I was going to support. The conversation I had on arrival in Brazil for the first time in 1995 ran roughly as follows: "What's your team over here then?" "I don't know, not decided yet" "What do you mean?" "My team in England is Manchester City, and we only really have extreme success or failure - we won 4 major cups in 3 seasons in the late 60s/70s but we've been relegated loads of time and we know how to screw up a game we should have tied up - and the fans are 'muito fiel' (very loyal) I want to support a team like that here." The upshot was that the man basically told me that only Corinthians could fit the bill becuase their support is known as 'O Fiel' and because they too regularly snatch defeat from the jaws of victory.

I asked who their famous players were and he said Socrates, Rivelino and Casagrande. My dad used to gush about Socrates and that nailed it for me. As an English lad doing a year of his degree in Brazil it further enthused me that the club's home ground is the Parque Sao Jorge (Saint George Park). However, the club mainly plays home games at the Morumbi Stadium, home of one of their hated rivals, São Paulo (the other rival being Palmeiras, the former team of Roberto Carlos and, later, Luis Felipe Scolari).

It's said of Corinthians that where most football clubs are followed by their fans, Corinthians is a set of fans who happen to drag a football club in their wake. Their most controversial group of supporters, the organised supporters network 'Gavioes da Fiel' (Hawks of the Faithful) organise a massive carnival parade and if football were banned, then as long as there was anyone left in Brazil in the first place, the Gavioes would celebrate Corintianidade ('Corinthian-ness') with drums and dancing anyway. They also famously invade other clubs' grounds and make away games feel like home matches, as they did in the 70s with a legendary clash with Flamengo at the Maracana in the Rio-Sao Paulo Cup.

Brazilian club football has taken many batterings over the years with corruption and low attendances, but if you want a team that will never provide a dull moment, this is it. And their kit looks cool.

www.corinthiansfutebol.com.br/pt-br/

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I recommend the work of artist Liam Spencer. He is a local artist whose work showing impressionist views of modern Manchester has been exhibited in the Lowry and Manchester Art Gallery. While you would need to check local listings for his exhibitions - there have been Spencer shows once or twice a year in the last few years - there are a few places you can find his work - not all of them totally obvious.

Manchester Art Gallery on Mosley Street has a couple of his panoramic paintings in its permanent collection, and the Lowry in Salford also has some of his work. Spencer's work has been reproduced in some limited print formats and is available from Wendy Levy Contemporary Art in Didsbury. While there, it would be worth a meal at the The Lime Tree restaurant in nearby West Didsbury, which also has a panorama painting of Salford Quays but the most unlikely place you would see a Spencer work is the reception to the Accident and Emergency section of North Manchester General Hospital in Crumpsall, which has a huge panorama of the hospital itself, at a worryingly low height given the agitated states I've seen some of the clientele in. Let's hope your visit to Didsbury's bars and restaurants doesn't cause you to visit the final stop on my Liam Spencer tour!

www.liamspencer-art.co.uk Also: The Lime Tree Restaurant - 8 Lapwing Lane
Didsbury; Tel:0161 445 1217. Wendy Levy Fine Art - 17 Warburton Street, Didsbury, Manchester, M20 6WA; Telephone: 0161 446 4880; www.wendyjlevy-art.com/; North Manchester General Hospital: Delaunays Road, Manchester, M8 5RB; 0161 795 4567.

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This, unfortunately, is only for those who understand Portuguese, but if you're into excellent graphic design, this Sao Paulo-based magazine is also for you. Trip magazine was founded in the 80s by some São Paulo surf nuts and has grown into a beautifully designed and utterly admirable publication. The magazine is not a lad mag, nor a style mag, or a surfing magazine, or a lifestyle magazine - it's all these things but overall, it's just Trip.

Trip was the magazine that inspired me to give up smoking by refusing to accept tobacco advertising and, for a change, challenging the usual boorish magazine standpoint on how to live by encouraging surfing and good health rather than a Loaded-style agenda espousing a rampantly hedonist culture. Part of their anti-smoking campaign featured a 'Frankenstein's Monster', a montage of pictures of ciggie-ravaged body parts.

Trip also houses the wonderful Gonzo-inspired writer Arthur Verissimo, now a television reporter and famous in his own right in Brazil, whose amusing escapades include going from São Paulo to Rio de Janeiro - not the short distance you'd imagine - using only municipal bus tickets for the poor and students called Vale Transportes.

Then we have the 'Trip Girls' and 'Show It' sections, which some European sensibilities might not like - 'Trip Girl' is what it says it is: a section in which a young model is tastefully photographed partially clothed (ok, partially undressed); the 'Show It' section shows off the alpha females of Sao Paulo's elite in their habitats on the state's social scene or on the beach. Both sections, however, simply reflect the sensual and relaxed Brazilian attitude to the body beautiful.

One issue a year features the female staff of Trip itself in an artfully-shot edition of their own. The women get their own back in the form of TPM - or 'Trip Para Mulheres' (Trip For Women). TPM is Portuguese for PMT, by the way - you can't fault their humour ... can you? Add to this the various columns of entertaining intelligence from founder and editor Paulo Lima as well as various correspondents in Brazil, the USA and the Old Continent and you get a slice of the confident, brash but very wordly vibe that makes São Paulo the city you'd be best advised not to underestimate, even less patronise. Should you go to Brazil, this magazine alone is a reason to learn Portuguese.

It's available all over Brazil from good newstands ... but Trip is a São Paulo state of mind.
www.revistatrip.com.br

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If you want a two-hour-long, food/beer-sozzled route to see a Manchester City game, as well as a chance to feed some geese, this is my dream route to my seat in the East Stand lower tier from Piccadilly Square: from Piccadilly, with your back to 1960s megalith, Piccadilly Plaza, you head up Tib Street to the YADGAR curry house. If you're veggie, you can get rice and three curries for £3.00 - same price as a pint in some of the Northern Quarter bars. £3.90 and you get lamb or chicken toppings too. Best tarka dhal in Manchester.

After that, you could go further up Tib Street and drink in Centro and then have another pint in the Copper Kettle, a pub whose restoration ran out of money - look at the ceiling on one side of the pub, and then the other. One side was restored, the other remains as it was when the building was almost derelict. However, if you choose to hit Great Ancoats Street at this stage, all there is from there is street and no canal. Instead, after Yadgar, I suggest you go back towards Piccadilly and locate the Mother Mac pub, on a side street off Oldham Street. This, I imagine, will remain like something out of Victorian times even long into another era in which Manchester aspires to make its eastern central section resemble a damper, rainier New York.

From Mother Mac's, you could stock up on samosas at Marhaba, one of the other remaining low-price curry houses in the city centre, or maybe buy some bread and head towards the canal - there's an entrance on to the towpath on Ducie Street, which is the road bearing left as you reach the ramp leading towards Piccadilly Station. Once on the canal, the geese are very 'people-friendly' - in other words, mind your fingers.

Continuing up the canal, you'll reach steps at Great Ancoats Street. Following crowds towards the ground, my final stop is the Bank Of England pub. It's not just a no-frills pub - it's a no-stitching-at-all pub. The toilets are signposted by a male and female pointing figure silhouette shapes, but the male silhouette says 'women' on it and the female one 'male' - everyone turns the wrong direction the first time, like one of those psychological tests where they write 'blue' on a red-coloured board. Once you've survived this delightful obstacle course, remember, you've still got a football match to watch, and the return leg into town afterwards to negotiate. As is often said of Manchester City, it's the 90 minutes in the middle that ruins the experience.

Between Manchester Piccadilly and Sportcity.

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Lencois is, to all intents and purposes, the hub of the Chapada Diamantina highlands. It is a sleepy (for now, at least) town which is reached from Salvador da Bahia in around six hours bus ride. From there, you can arrange day excursions on walks and/or to places of astounding beauty, including grottoes and caves some of which allow visitors to snorkel in, as well as longer treks through the hills to the 'Fumaca' Falls (pronounced 'Foo-Massa' = 'Smoke').

The town itself is a wonderfully relaxed place to go to either after the tropical buzz of Salvador or, if you're coming in from Brasilia or another place in the interior, it's a great point to stop off before hitting Bahia's state capital. One of the walks to Fumaca allows walkers to stop at the 'Escorregadeira', an exhilarating natural rock waterslide which may or may not make your local osteopath a few quid in years to come, as well as some stunning pools that precede an under-reported classic experience of travel in Brazil: showering under a waterfall.

The land is known as Chapada Diamantina because it used to be a hunting ground for diamonds. The boom is over, with eco-tourism now a main source of wealth for the region; diamonds aren't forever, but my memories of walking up to Fumaca will be with me for a lot longer.

Bahia state, six hours inland.

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Recife's main city centre is a baffling and confusing place but I grew to love it there; it's not a conventional place to hang around but since when did travel always have to be about things that are beautiful in an obvious sense? Olinda and Porto de Galinhas are mainly idyllic, beautiful locations, of which Pernambuco state has no shortage, but Recife's main central islands have a strange charm.

At night, you need to be a bit streetwise, but there are the clubs and bars in the Recife Antigo area and the Patio de Sao Pedro and it's a great night out, but in the daytime, Recife city centre's more mundane sights are something that for some reason captivate me. It's not one thing in particular - it's the whole place. At certain times of the day, you get old men selling decrepit vinyl albums lined on the walls of the square to the side of Avenida Dantas Barreto. Near Igreja do Carmo, you'll find men singing Embolada, a mesmeric poetic duel that'll make you wonder how the hell they can summon the power to make you lose sense of where you are using just their voices and a pair of tambourines. You'll find people barbecuing meats and cheeses in unlikely corners and men fishing for crab off the bridges.

The oldest law faculty in the Americas is here, cheek by jowl with some of the best and cheapest lunch restaurants you may ever find; there are some faded Deco-style buildings and plenty of Portuguese colonial-style architecture too, with wrought iron British-designed bridges connecting the three islands, as well as a former prison that doubles up as a craft centre.

Among the narrow streets, men use makeshift sound systems to promote the clothes or radios or cutlery their shop is trying to sell you. This sort of thing would be considered noise pollution in most developed countries, but it makes for a strange sort of music in Recife; "Clothes shop MC on the M-I-C", said my friend.

Recife, Pernambuco, Brazil.

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Nacao Zumbi (pronounced Nass-Ow-Zoom-Bee) is a band in its own right, like New Order. I use New Order as a parallel because both bands lost an influential lead singer who, it was believed, was about to make music with his band that would take them on to a world stage. The singer in NZ's case was a man called Chico Science, who died in 1997.

The band, Chico Science & Nacao Zumbi, were basically an accidental clash of two groups: a punk band called Loustal, and an Afro-Brazilian drumming/roots organisation called Lamento Negro. The bands had a jam in which they discovered that regional styles of drum-based music used variously in carnival parades and other folk celebrations sounded amazing when buffering the sound of a four-piece rock band. These styles, Maracatu, Embolada, Baiao, Coco and Ciranda, were regional sounds taken for granted and were, to a large degree, neglected and undervalued parts of the culture of Pernambuco state.

The band that formed from this, together with another local group called Mundo Livre SA ('Free World Ltd') wrote a manifesto in 1991 which compared the dried-out mangroves of the region to the moribund music scene, comparing their reinvigoration with the way the band itself had taken music forms that had been carried on by a few loving locals. The manifesto was called "Caranguejos Com Cerebro", or 'Crabs With Brains' and can be found on the internet in English with little difficulty.

It speaks of ramming parabolic antennae into the mud of the mangrove and communicating with the world, so a computer 'Bit' speaking from the 'Mangue' saw to it that the music form was christened 'Mangue-Bit', which was later altered to 'Mangue-Beat'. Anyway ... after a kerfuffle over the new sound coming out of Recife and its sister city Olinda, CSNZ were signed to Sony Brazil. Their debut album, Da Lama Ao Caos (From Mud To Chaos) and the follow-up, AfroCiberDelia, both showcase the marriage of archaic regional beats and modern electronic music with the confrontational politics of the band.

Chico Science's car came off the road in a pre-carnival accident in 1997, and doom-mongerers in Brazil forecast the group's demise. Their response was to write a second manifesto "Quanto Vale Uma Vida" ('How Much One Life Is Worth') and the band has since released a trio of albums on two labels.

The live spectacle is something anyone who visits not just Recife or Olinda but any city in Brazil would be urged not to miss. While the mainstream press in the UK seems set on covering Mutantes and indeed any Brazilian music whose heyday was over 20 years ago, if you see Nacao Zumbi play live, you would be taking up a chance to see a band who are in their prime right NOW. As well as that, you'll know what the fuss is about when they are booked to play the Barbican in May 2031, and you'll have the night of your life.

www.fomedetudo.com.

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A huge concrete, five-storey shopping centre where you will find the most astounding array of second-hand records, bootleg and genuine sportswear including Brazilian surf and skatewear and also the shirt and other souvenirs of every Brazilian football team you could expect to find. A stunning place, a bit like Afflecks Palace in Manchester, but way more exciting.

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It's a festival in mid-September in homage to the patron saint of Barcelona. There are several traditional Catalan cultural features, including Sardanes (dancing in circles), Castellers (human castles) and parades of Gigants (papier mache dolls two storeys high). Apart from that, there is usually a parallel cultural programme involving live music on stages in the city and/or club events. Apart from celebrating La Virgen de La Merce, it is the first major event after most Catalans come back into town after the traditional exodus to the coast or the mountains in August, a hellishly hot month when locals usually leave the city to tourists who don't know better.

September in Barcelona - all over the place

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There have been several spells in recent times where shark attacks have been prevalent. This doesn't mean don't go to Recife - in fact DO go to Recife. What it means is, make bloody sure you keep up to date on the current situation by asking in your hotel/pousada. The beaches around Olinda, up the coast, don't seem to have been affected but a magazine called Trip ran a feature a few years ago about surfers who had lost limbs. They did it so you don't have to. Oh - the word for 'shark' is TUBARAO, and 'sea' is MAR. "Tem tubarao no mar aqui?"

Boa Viagem, it seems!

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It's the place where Barcelona fans gather after big victories. It is good fun after any major win but delightful chaos after they reach any final, win any trophy or beat Real Madrid or Espanyol.

Top of the Ramblas, at the entrance to the Placa Catalunya metro station

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