Liverpool

I'm currently in Liverpool and have been since late Friday night. Me and my Aussie friend Zac caught a bus from London in the afternoon (and I had just come in by train from Cambridge - an hour away). The bus to Liverpool was waaaay cheaper than the train. But it was way late. We have been staying in Liverpool with our friends Lisa and Cat, who we met the previous weekend in Cardiff. They've been excellent hosts. They live a little bit outside Liverpool in a suburb called Maghull (pronounced kinda like "muggle"). Lisa, Cat and Lisa's fiance Martin picked us up and gave us a late night tour of Liverpool, then fed us and gave us beer. An excellent welcome.

Next evening we went on a pilgrimage (for this Beatles fan, anyway) to The Cavern Club on Mathew Street in Liverpool. For those of you who don't know, this is the club where the Beatles started out and played an astonishing 292 times in the early 1960s (a fact duly noted in the club). The Cavern closed between the early seventies and 1984, and had to partly be excavated to be re-opened - it's a couple flights underground- so it isn't exactly the way it looked back in the day, but pretty close. It's extremely warm down there - Thankfully there is no smoking. I can only imagine what it was like back when the Beatles played. They had a Beatles cover band playing.

During the day on Saturday, our friends took us out to Crosby Beach, north of Liverpool. There is an excellent art installation there by Antony Gormley entitled "Another Place": about a hundred life-sized iron men are spread out along the beach for 4 kilometres. It's pretty cool to see the tide recede, and gradually uncover the heads and shoulders of these figures.

The iron men on Crosby Beach

Sunday we went down to the docklands to the refurbished Albert Dock. It houses several shops and a couple of museums. We visited the Maritime Museum and went on The Wheel - a ferris wheel similar to the London Eye (which I passed on) - from which you could get great vistas of Liverpool and The Mersey. Monday, we returned to the Albert Dock and went to The Beatles Story - a Beatles museum. Loved it. I have to go back: They have a Beatles-themed Starbucks adjacent to it that I still have to go to (it was closing as we left). I need to say it again: Beatles-themed Starbucks. Wicked.

Yes, I'm wearing an audio guide. They're helpful.