Pilgrimage to Liverpool

We landed at John Lennon International Airport and I wasn’t sure if we’d have to deal with immigration and/or customs.  We were going from one EU country to another but some countries are pickier about such things than others.  Anyway, we didn’t have to worry with any of that.

I knew that National Express ran a bus to the Liverpool Coach Center and that taking it would be cheaper than a cab, so that was my plan.  As I walked around the airport, though, I was having all kinds of difficulty finding where to catch the bus.  There were other buses heading to the Liverpool City Centre but I had no idea where those were going to drop me off.  I saw the cab fares posted on the wall and they weren’t outrageously expensive so I decided to break a cardinal rule of mine and for only the second time ever in Europe, I used a cab.  I’ll get over it.

I got to my hotel and it was already starting to get dark.  And crappy.  The weather was pretty damn crappy.  I walked around the city center for a little while and then went to get something to eat.  In order to get something different, I went to a 1950s US diner.  The food was meh.  What I found interesting was that there were tons of American flags in the restaurant and they all had fifty stars, even though we didn’t have fifty states until midway through 1959.  So, I guess it was a late-1959 diner.  And there were only three songs that were playing over and over again and one of them came out in 1960.  If I was going to open a 1950s US diner, I’d pay attention to these little details.  But, then, I probably wouldn’t open it in Liverpool, so there you go.

I went out and got a drink before heading back to my hotel.  There are tons of bars in the Liverpool City Centre.  Even in my first hours in Liverpool, I was able to take notice of what would become my most lasting memory of Liverpool.  That is, of course, the rowdy, drunken, scary people all over the place.  There were people pissing on the sides of buildings and throwing up on the streets and yelling and random people on the sidewalks.  I’m not saying that I’ve never done any of these things but it was the first time I’ve ever been in a city where the behavior has been so prevalent. 

No biggie.  I’m used to drunken people.  Often, I’m drunken people.  I’ll move on.  In the morning, I went to breakfast at the hotel and it was bad but filling.  The sausages were pretty good.  And I figured that since I was in England, I should have baked beans for breakfast.  Oh, the English . . .

After breakfast, I headed out to the Albert Dock.  The Tate Museum is in that area but I wasn’t really in an art museum mood.  Instead, I went to the museum in which I was really interested – the Beatle Story.  Needless to say, though I’ll say it anyway, it’s a Beatle museum.  It had some really cool exhibits, mostly from the early days, like instruments from the Quarrymen days and relics from the Casbah and Cavern clubs.  There were also brief exhibits for each of the Fab Four during their post-Beatle years.  My favorite exhibit from that section was a glassed-off room that had John Lennon’s white piano, a guitar and a pair of Lennon’s glasses.

The Beatle museum, however, was just a lead up for one of the things on this trip to which I was most looking forward – the Magical Mystery Tour.  Yes, I’m a Beatle freak and this trip to Liverpool was a pilgrimage of sorts.  I’ll move on to that in the next entry.