DAY ONE

Friday, February 11, 2011 – Woke up at 6AM…pressed snooze button until 6:15AM…finally got out of bed. First thing’s first, rubbed eyes for three minutes. Second, more important but far less satisfying thing, called a cab to get me at 7:10AM. I packed the night before so I just had to put my pyjamas in my bag and I was pretty much ready to go. By the time I got dressed and ate breakfast and packed a snack for the train, the cab was outside my house.

The train was direct so I didn’t have to faff with any connections (they are my nemesis). It was fairly busy but I reserved a seat so I was all set. (I highly recommend reserving seats, it’s the only way to travel; unless, of course, your luggage consists of a duffel bag full of tiny Styrofoam balls or some kind of La-Z-Boy recliner.) The ride was just over 2 hours, during which time I read a couple chapters of my book, took a wee nap, ate my snack, and even painted my nails (with no disasters)! All that and I still had time to stare aimlessly out the window for a while.

I was meeting my friend Nicole at the Lime Street Station. Her train was due at 9:20 and mine wasn’t until 9:58, but she said she would wait for me so when I got there I texted her to let her know. I didn’t get a reply for a while so I tried her again. After half an hour with no reply, I started to worry. I didn’t know where we were staying or the numbers of any of the other people she was travelling with. I started imagining the worst. I thought, “Oh God, I’m going to be stuck here alone all weekend and I’ll have to book into a hotel (we already knew that all the hostels were full).” I started thinking about how I won’t be able to afford rent this month because of all these added expenses, then I realised I didn’t have to wait until Sunday to leave. My train ticket was only £19.50. It would be cheaper just to get a new ticket than wait until Sunday and pay hotel fees. At this point I had to tell myself to get a grip. Then, finally, my phone buzzed. It was a text from Nicole! It said, “Oh no, you’re there? We get in at 9:20 PM!!” GUTTED! ‘Twas a serious miscommunication.

I spent the next several text messages explaining how in this country 9PM is 21:00! And that is what you write when you mean PM, or you write “PM” next to the numbers! And she spent the next several promising me booze.

So, now I had 11 hours to kill in Liverpool by myself and with a kind of heavy bag. I decided to start by taking pictures of everything I could see from outside the train station. (Liverpool is really pretty!) Then I walked to the Walker Art Gallery, where I saw a painting of the Liverpool city landscape, on which I saw the World Museum, to where I proceeded next.

The World Museum has five floors (including an aquarium!) so it took me a while to get through it all. Soon it was 2 PM and I was damn hungry. I walked deeper into the city and found myself on the high street.

I decided to get lunch at a Mexican place called Bar Burrito and then see a movie! I saw Never Let Me Go. It’s an adaptation of a novel by Kazuo Ishiguro, which I just finished reading. It was quite different from the novel; it had most of the key details right but they were either performed by the wrong character, out of sequence, or surprised on you with no background or build up. Whenever I see a film adaptation of a book I’ve read I always wonder if someone who hasn’t read the novel would understand why things are happening. I think when I’m watching I fill in the blanks yet to be explained or plot points completely missed out on my own; at the end of the film I can’t remember what I’ve just seen on the screen and what’s simply my recollection of the book. I think in the future I will always take someone with me who hasn’t read the book and grill them on the film after we’ve watched it

Well, I timed my afternoon quite poorly. I went to a 15:15 show that ended at 17:25 sending me back onto the streets in near darkness (and rain) and with lots of places preparing to close for the night. I should have hit more museums during the day and gone to a later show that would let me out closer to the meeting-up time. As it happens I spent about an hour browsing in a few shops and dodging the rain. But when my bag became too heavy for me I found refuge at The Welkin (a Wetherspoon pub, where else?). And it was there where I stayed for the next three hours (writing this! I also ate nachos).

I met Nicole and her posse of friends at the station where we met up with two more people (one of whom lived in Liverpool) and walked to our hostel (Embassie Backpackers, 1 Falkner Square). After checking in and dropping off our bags we headed right back out into town to conquer the pub scene. Eyrique, our impromptu tour guide, led us to the Philharmonic, a pub located right outside the Philharmonic Concert Hall. It was an incredibly gorgeous old building that has been a pub for ages. The “gents” toilet is actually a listed building in itself! We found out the next day that John Lennon used to frequent that pub! I was totally excited by this news in a very cool and not at all lame way. We went to a second pub/bar after that, which was much more modern. The girls’ toilets had pictures of pin-up girls stuck across the walls…it was probably not a listed building.

DAY TWO

The next day we got ourselves some free toast from the hostel kitchen (free, unlimited toast!) and then made plans for the day. Nicole, Sarah, and I met up with their friend Tina and headed to Albert Dock to get on the Magical Mystery Tour of Beatles locations. The others, Lucy, Sarah, Lindsey, Steve, Jordan, and Will did various other activities including museums, shopping, and Chinese food. On our tour we saw the house where Ringo Starr was born, George Harrison’s childhood home, Paul McCartney’s last home in Liverpool (where over 100 Beatles songs were written), and John Lennon’s Aunt Mimi’s house. We also stopped at Penny Lane (where the street signs get stolen about three times a week), and Strawberry Field. We also passed the church where Eleanor Rigby is buried and where the Beatles played one of their first gigs; although Paul says he had no idea someone by that name was buried there and it was not related to the song at all. We saw loads of classic Beatles locales and heard a lot of trivia surrounding the band. I will have a new appreciation for the songs and lyrics now that I’ve actually been there.

Our first stop after the tour (and lunch) was The Cavern Club. After walking down the endless flights of stairs (it’s like five basements underground) I became overwhelmingly giddy and proceeded to jump up and down with the biggest grin on my face or about three minutes. We used our tour receipts to get free souvenir photos and thought we’d get a pint while we were there. Awesome idea! We then spent the next hour drinking those pints and dancing like fools to the live band playing Beatles tunes. Then I bought a t-shirt.

I already said it, but being in that place made me incredibly happy. I got a little emotional, too, thinking about my family. I’m not sure if I was sad because they couldn’t be there to experience it or if it was because we were supposed to have seen it all together in December. Or were they happy tears because of how much I loved it? Or knew how much they would have loved it? Especially my mum. My mum taught me to love The Beatles, and so I do. And I know she would have danced like a fool with me in the front of that stage, too! I guess we’ll just have to go again someday. Maybe even fly into John Lennon International Airport!

After The Cavern we headed back to the hostel to meet up with everyone, have dinner, and start drinking!

The living room of the hostel had been taken over by mattresses and grumpy sleeping people so we ended up hanging out in the boys’ room where we played a little bus driver and a very disjointed game of Kings. It didn’t take long before we switched to chatting and then quickly to singing. We met two girls, Karen and Lena, from Italy, who came out with us that night, as well. They are from the northern border of Italy with Austria and actually speak German as a first language and Italian second. The town they live in is raised with Austrian culture, as were they, but they still consider themselves Italian and not Austrian. I had no idea a place like that existed and Karen told us all about its history and how it changed between and after the World Wars.

We only had one destination that night. The Cavern Club! Ya, twice in one day, it was just that awesome. (Fun fact, originally The Cavern didn’t serve alcohol so The Beatles and other bands went to a place called The Grapes across the street for pints between gigs.) On Saturdays a band called the Cave Dwellers plays there and allows members of the audience who play instruments or sing to go on stage and replace a member of the band for a song. Jordan got up and sang Revolution and it was amazing. Not only is he a great singer but you could tell how much fun he was having and it was contagious. When he got off stage he was absolutely beaming; he looked like a kid who just met Spiderman dressed as Batman in a candy shop! I am definitely going to have to learn an instrument (other than Moonlight Sonata on piano) or at least the words to an entire song so I can go back and perform on that stage. When the band took a break I popped on stage and took my picture, so that’s something at least!

We stayed there all night and danced and sang along to all the songs; it was bliss. Really loud bliss. We had some excitement on the way home as well, including the cab driver dropping us off not quite at our hostel and us proceeding to get lost trying to find it. Back at the hostel there was an Irish guy named Dara who was very easy to anger and very hard to understand. We accidentally set him off by talking about toast, which turned into him telling us Canadians are too patriotic. He said “I’m not Irish, I’m Dara,” and “If I say ‘That man is an arsehole’ it means I think I’m an arsehole.” It was at this point that we smiled and politely excused ourselves for bed, while exchanging glances that said “what just happened?”

DAY THREE

Sunday morning came pretty quickly, especially since everyone seemed to wake up around 6:30 AM, much to the chagrin of the woman who was not part of our group and still trying to sleep. Although, she had been sleeping since about 7 PM the night before so we might have been doing her a favour. We tried to keep sleeping for a few more hours but eventually around 8-something we were all pretty much up for good. We lazed around the hostel for a while and hung out in the kitchen. Around 11:30 AM we finally decided to head out. We split up again; some of us went for English breakfast while others had dim sum.

Then the English breakfast people went to Albert Dock to the Beatles Story museum or the Tate Gallery. I went to the Beatles museum. It was a fun way to portray the band’s chronology with some original memorabilia (like guitars and suits). It was an audio guided tour, which was fun because I’d never done that before. Around about the Yellow Submarine era I started to get uncomfortably hot and then experienced about a 10 minute déjà-vu including mentioning experiencing said déjà-vu several times (it was wild). The museum finished up a few minutes later and we exited through the gift shop (as you do).

We met up with everyone at a bar/restaurant called Circo, a circus themed place with terrifying decor. Above the bar were three clown torsos whose faces were either screaming or puking and had guns/cannons sticking out of their stomachs. Other decorations included a stuffed polar bear, a boar head, a horse, and two ventriloquist dummies hanging in a cage dressed like Clockwork Orange characters, but with a monocle instead of make-up. We left quickly.

That pretty much ended our trip. We grabbed two cabs to the hostel to get our bags and then headed straight to the station. I said my goodbyes and nice-meeting/seeing-yous to the others as they were all heading to London.

I had an indescribably fantastic time and would do it all again immediately. Even though I love York (and I do love York) Liverpool may be my new favourite city. If I wasn’t leaving in two months I might very well consider moving there. Plus, I just love the accent. For anyone who’s wondering the people really do sound just like The Beatles!

I got on my train back to York, which, I learned, travels along the first passenger rail line in the country (Liverpool to Manchester). I told our cab driver (who gave us that tidbit) that I would inform the others how it was, so, it was great! A little jolty at times (as captured in my journal by some very messy writing) but nice and direct! I told my best friend that I wanted to live there and never leave, I said “I guess that’s why they call it Liverpool and not Leaverpool.” She made me promise to include that in my blog. So, I hope you liked it!

There are places I remember all my life, though some have changed. Some forever, not for better, some have gone and some remain. – The Beatles, In My Life