Hey All,
I’m going to try to make an attempt on getting caught up on the backlog of blog posts I have this week, but we’ll have to see how that goes with classes and such.
So if I remember I correctly, I left off when I was on the flight between Dublin and Liverpool. To this day it was the most surreal flight I have ever taken. First of all, the flight took only forty-five minutes from takeoff to landing since we were just crossing the Irish Channel. Five minutes after we climbed to cruising altitude, the captain turned on the Fasten Seatbelts sign and we began our decent. Second, including cost somewhere around 12€, roughly $16 or less than the cost of a pizza. Airfare around Europe in general is extremely cheap, great for the college student looking to do a bit of traveling! A noted exception to this is flying in and out of Paris, which frequently makes lists of the most expensive cities to fly in and out of in the world. Paris has three airports, Charles de Gaulle, Orly, and Beauvais; though Beauvais can only be considered Parisian in the sense that you could consider Batavia part of Buffalo. All the cheap flights fly out of Beauvais, including flights operated by RyanAir, likely the most popular budget airline in Europe.
However, the principle of economics “you get what you pay for” holds true. Though they are an inexpensive means of travel, RyanAir has small seats, an incredibly strict carry-on luggage policy, offers no refunds or transfers for missed planes, charges 5€ to book online, and occasionally your flight is filled with fifty inebriated football hooligans who provide some interesting in flight entertainment.
After a quick flight embellished by a few hearty chants and sing-alongs we stepped off the plane at Liverpool Airport in the late evening. We took a quick taxi ride to our hostel for the night eager to check into our rooms and call it an early night. We arrived at the address listed and walked up to the porch of what appeared to be a very fancy bed and breakfast. We were greeted at the door by an older lady with her hair in curlers and two of the largest dogs I have ever seen in my life. She ran through the standard check-in procedure while asking us about our trip so far and punctuating her sentences with “oh isn’t that lovely”. After giving her a “tenner” as a deposit (£10) we left for our rooms.
Our hostel was not there, but actually in a building of its own further down the street mixed in with residential buildings. When we arrived the door was unlocked and the building looked so much like someone’s home that we tried and saw that our keys fit in the door anyways before walking in. We were greeted by at least twenty young Spanish speaking students who were preparing for a night on the town. Not a single one spoke English beyond ‘hello’, but they were very pleasant to share a hostel with. All the rooms in the hostel were converted rooms of a Victorian style house. There was no staff at the hostel, as far as I can tell it was just an old property that was bought and looked after by the staff of the bed and breakfast down the road. The house had good character including big wooden staircases and carpeting throughout.
Since we were a decent ways in the suburbs, we took a train into the city the next morning. It was a weekend and Liverpool was very lively. Aside from the historical buildings and its well developed inner harbor, the city is also widely known for its shopping. Liverpool One is the newest of the city’s shopping centers, but it is very impressive. It has a footprint of 42 acres with hundreds of shops and restaurants encased in a beautifully landscaped open air layout. The lady from the hostel said that families will stay for the week just for the shopping.
Liverpool’s inner harbor is fantastically laid out and reminds me a lot of downtown Baltimore (and also what downtown Buffalo could be given good planning and time). There are fancy restaurants, docks for ship cruises, and many buildings housing huge museums which are all free to the public.
Of course being Liverpool I wanted to spend some time at the Beatles museum, a very well done look at the history of the band including life-sized replicas of important places along the way such as the Cavern Club and Abbey Road Studios. We also visited the ‘actual’ Cavern Club just a mile or so away from the harbor where the group played several hundred shows earning them a local following and catching the attention of the producer which would eventually land them their first record deal . Though the original was sold and torn down for a highway that was never built, the former owner sold the original land and construction materials (including the original bricks) to an investor who produced a faithful replica of the club in the same spot. The club was at least five stories underground, extremely humid, and quite small considering that the Beatles’ shows would pack several hundred people into the space. I suppose the most surprising thing I got out of the museum was how quickly the group went from a local hit to international fame and then were gone. It was quite a prolific career in less than ten years.
We knew that going back to our hostel meant that we were staying in for the rest of the night, since we were quite far from the city center. So we decided to kill some time and go on an amphibious vehicle tour of the city. The vehicle was one that was actually used in the Normandy invasion during World War II, restored and operating as a tour bus/boat which I believe was named something delightfully corny like ‘The Yellow Duckmarine’. The tour operator was an cheerful fellow who provided commentary that was interesting but at the same time geared towards an audience of younger children, of which there were many on board.
As we started off around the town he asked each group on the tour where they were from. Most said Liverpool, a few said Manchester (to which the tour guide cracked a wise remark, Manchester and Liverpool are rival cities especially when it comes to football), there were two couples from Edinburgh, and a few from other parts of the UK. Lastly, we replied saying that we were from New York. All the children on the tour exclaimed “Wow!” quite loudly and even the adults looked fairly surprised. As it turns out, Liverpool is much more popular of a destination for visitors from within the UK than it is for international travelers.
The tour took us around some of the important places in the city and then back to the harbor where it drove down the dock ramp right into the water. As we headed into the water he stated that he had some facts for the Americans onboard about Liverpool’s role in the American Civil War. He first did a quick review of what the American Civil War was and when it was fought which I found strange until I realized that I know next to nothing about British history so the same is likely true in reverse.
As it turns out the canon that fired the first shot of the America Civil War, a shell that burst over Fort Sumter, was manufactured in Liverpool in a building that we drove past. Liverpool was also home to the final surrender of the Civil War, the crew of the CSS Shenandoah who had fired the last shot of the war. The Shenandoah was in the middle of a commerce raiding mission in the Atlantic when General Lee surrendered at Appomattox Court House. Of course, being at sea the vessel did not learn of the surrender and carried on business as usual for two months after. Finally in early August it captured a vessel whose crew informed them that the majority of the Confederacy had surrendered and the war was considered over. The crew assumed (quite correctly) that if they were to head back to America they would be tried and hung as pirates. Instead they sailed to Liverpool and surrendered their vessel to the captain of the HMS Donegal in the very harbor that we were in.
Grabbing dinner afterwards were lucky enough to see the aftermath of a Liverpool football match, which had just let out at the stadium just outside of downtown. The fans were very rowdy and walked out of the stadium back to their cars or trains shouting chants and singing songs in a heavy British accent, they had obviously won.
We spent the next day exploring Manchester, only a short ride away. The city was more spread out and linked by an extensive tram system. Our hostel was also rather unique. It consisted of a common room, kitchen, showers, bathrooms, and a bunkroom set up in the basement of an existing hotel that was converted from an old industrial building. Their refurnishing was very well done, it was an enjoyable place to stay for a day. The next day we caught our high speed train into London.
In England we were lucky enough to be able to stay with Kaitlin’s older cousin Lolly and her husband who owned a flat in the Kensington neighborhood near Hyde park on the west side of London. Due to rush hour we arrived shortly before them and decided to meet at the neighborhood pub The Builder’s Arms. As was explained, a lot of the character of a London neighborhood is built around the local pub, and this was the one for their immediate area. Small pubs around London specialized in cask ale, which is a full bodied beer brewed in small batches with a variety of spices and flavors and served just below room temperature. I tried the house specialty ‘Doombar’ and found it quite good, though it was a shock to have a drink that bordered on lukewarm. We were treated to a home-cooked meal and turned in early so we would have time to explore the city the next day.
I had been in London once before, during my only other trip to Europe for a week when I was ten, so I didn’t feel the need to revisit every tourist attraction in the city. We did, however, walk around a large part of downtown including along the River Thames.
The one place that I most wanted to visit was the London Tower, full of different exhibits about its use throughout the years as well as the famous sights such as the Crown Jewels. We took a brief guided tour by one of the Yeoman Warders (‘Beefeaters’), the queen’s guards for the Tower. He and his family both live on castle grounds, in a house along the outer wall with all of the other Yeoman Warders. I couldn’t help but think how interesting in must be to live in an actual castle, especially since he said he had two sons!
Having some time before sunset we took a ride on the subway (the ‘tube’) to Greenwich, a district of London to the Southeast. On the highest point is the Royal Observatory which hosts a naval museum and planetarium. Running through the center of the observatory, and marked on the pavement by a line, is the Prime Meridian hence why the time zone it’s in is called Greenwich Mean Time (GMT). At the top of the observatory is a large red ball that to this day drops every afternoon at 1pm, originally for ships in the harbor to synchronize their clocks with. Unfortunately we arrived close to sundown and the observatory was closed to the public. However, we did get to catch an excellent sunset from one of the highest points in the city.
On my way back to Paris I stopped by Canterbury where Kaitlin’s school, the University of Kent is located. The dormitories there have five people in a ‘flat’ with a bathroom and shower and every two flats share a kitchen. The campus has a traditional college campus field with greens and quads and is situated on the top of a hill that overlooks the entire town of Canterbury. I was intrigued to learn about their education system. In high school you choose a concentration of study with the intention of continuing that in university. You then fill out a single application for the whole country, but mark down your choices in majors and campuses that then inform you of their decision. The schools look at how you did with the classes in your concentration and from that base their admission. Therefore, one must know what they are going to major in fairly early in high school, as it is difficult to apply for majors if they do not match your high school concentration. Grading is not averaged, rather you have a mark for each class either 1st, 2nd, etc.
On my way back to Paris I took the bullet-shaped Eurostar high speed train which traveled the whole way at 186mph, including a journey underneath the Channel Tunnel between Dover and Callais. The ride was incredibly smooth for traveling over-ground at that speed and one could hardly tell that we were moving that fast until you looked out the window. Amazingly, that is not even the fastest train in Europe, which is the TGV (Train à Grande Vitesse, literally “Very Fast Train”) which routinely runs across France at an impressive 200mph. To put that in perspective, a train of that speed between Buffalo and Albany would take a journey of eighty minutes.
In all, the journey took less than two hours, much shorter than my journey in the opposite direction! I returned in time for my class in the afternoon and quickly got back into the routine of schoolwork. However, the next few weekends gave me a few good opportunities to take short trips, so more to come about those later.
-Adam
