We were feeling good after having met the friendly Liverpool hostel staff on Friday night: unfortunately it was all downhill from there. No pub would serve us dinner at 7:30pm. We almost got egged, possibly for not having the Liverpool FC supporter haircut. We just grabbed a curry and headed back to the hostel.
Saturday, again, not so pleasant. Caught the bus into town (the driver was angry at us asking if we were at the right stop and told us what he thought in his thick Scouser accent).
The attractions were OK - we went to the official-esque Beatles exhibition, with an audio guide narrated by John Lennon's sister. You weren't allowed to take photos, so of course I have a heap. That rule is silly. The Tate Gallery passed the "does it have art from people I know" test, with a Picasso and a Warhol among others. My record players wouldn't have been out of place in the modern art gallery.
Liverpool is a city of bad haircuts. It also has "Emo Square". If Birmingham has the highest proportion of jewelers, I'm sure Queen Anne Square in Liverpool has the highest proportion of emos I've ever seen. They radiated out from a central pod of blackness and woe, in a star-like pattern; the ones on the furthest reach weren't even wearing any black!
Some cool graffiti though.
Another trip to try and find dinner at a pub was even more futile. The pub over the road from Liverpool FC seemed it was closed to the public for a 10th birthday party. The one place we'd found the day before that served food closed the kitchen even earlier on a Saturday. We wanted to watch the cricket so we headed to a sports bar, but 2 mins before the final started, they changed to some second string football game (something as relevant as a 1974 replay a game of Yorkshire Under 14s),
The people next to us at the bar seemed to suggest we should order beer using only the words "pint", "bitter" and "lah-gah". I asked for a bourbon and coke. "Scotch and coke?" "Bourbon and coke". "Scotch and coke then". erm, sure. Whatever. Something about my hunger and the double strength of this drink caused me instantly to become Three Beers Awesome, and when Cathy spilt his own pint, we decided to just cut and run. We were just drunk enough that this was funny on the way home.
Russell was wearing his Highlanders shirt back at Epsteins so I hassled him for not supporting Canterbury and we had a few more drinks in our room. Dinner was leftovers and a pizza we bought from one of four takeaways (we bought it from the Pizza/Chinese/Fish'n'Chips/Kebab store, rather than from the Fish'n'Chips/Chinese/Kebab/Pizza or Kebab/Fish'n'Chips/Pizza/Chinese stors next to it). The chap there was a very friendly Moroccan gent. With one exception, everyone friendly we met in Liverpool wasn't from there.
To paraphrase someone we heard later in the trip (sssh, you're supposed to believe I'm writing this live), the best thing about Liverpool is the road to the airport.
Tags: travel
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This entry and the Nottingham post appeared during one of my daily Eppy-searches via Google Blogsearch.
Just to let you know I'm glad Brian's grandparents' old home agreed with you ~ although I'm not quite happy with the manner in which they mislead people into thinking the hostel was Brian's actual childhood home. It wasn't ~ his parents' house is at 97 Queens Drive in Childwall.
I'm hoping to visit Liverpool about a year from now, and will be spending the entire time doing the Epstein sites and haunts, rather than the Beatle places that everyone else in the world seems to prefer.
Cheers!
There's a plaque on the outside of the house that explains that it was the house of his grandparents, and somewhere he used to stay. The place has just come under new management, so I suspect the new owner and the couple that are running it will be changing the advertising - they're definitely improving the place in every other regard, not that it felt like it needs much!