Liverpool

It’s been a Hard Days Night and I’ve been working like a dog! We landed in Liverpool early this morning. As we got off the ship we were greeted by a ukulele band of 50 something’s playing & singing Beatles tunes! It was a great way to start the day. 

All I knew of Liverpool before today was that it was the home of the Beatles. Liverpool has a much more interesting history than that. It was one of the major ports of the slave trading for 200 years. It expanded quickly to handle the rich cargoes from the Indies: sugar, rum & cotton. Mostly slaves were the main export of the triangle (Indies, US, Liverpool). It also hosts 2 cathedrals, both entirely different. Liverpool has ½ of the Catholic population of Britain in its diocese. It is a modern Cathedral, the Catholic Metropolitan church of Christ the King, that the locals call Paddy’s Wigwam. The other, the Liverpool Cathedral, was designed to be the largest Anglican Church in the world. It too is very impressive in a different way.

We took the local Liverpool Hop on Hop Off bus around the city. It was a great way to see where we wanted to get off on our second time around. I had no idea that Liverpool had so many beautiful buildings. There are streets and streets of Georgian homes, beautiful buildings and cathedrals and lots of Beatle stuff!

I walked into an old Beatle store that had posters of the Beatles, records from the Beatles, ties that have Beatles on them, shoelaces with Ringo, George, John and Paul’s pictures on them & any other item that you could put a Beatle’s name on (except dishtowels).

We then found a McDonald’s that had free wifi and used it to catch up on some mail and banking. By lunchtime the McDonald’s was packed with families, businessmen and mostly locals. It was 3 floors of people wall to wall. I guess McDonald’s is popular everywhere.

We hopped back on the bus and by now it was getting very cloudy and overcast. We were keeping our fingers crossed that it wouldn’t rain until we made it to our final stop and it didn’t. We got off at Albert Dock which is filled with restaurants, stores and boats for sale. We found a great Crepe restaurant and had a delicious lunch of crepes and a GREAT nutella and banana crepe for dessert.

Liverpool is a wonderful town where the people call you “Love” when the bump into you, (“excuse me love”), where music being piped into buildings has one of the Beatles tunes playing and all in all a really friendly town where “all you n
eed is Love”.

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