a rainy day in liverpool

With the weekend in the UK projected to be one of the last nice bouts of weather before the fall hit (which is rare here), me and my two travel friends, Claire and Sarah, knew we wanted to go do something fun. In Manchester it was pretty hot, like 75 and a little sweaty which is amazingly good here. Why not go to the beach! Why not on the coast in Liverpool! I excitedly packed my swimsuit and a book to read on the sand. *enter the rain the next morning*

While it did look a bit gloomy outside, we were all excited to still go to Liverpool. So we hopped on to our 30 minute $6 train (roundtrip!!!) and made our seatmate uncomfortable with our talks about sororities and other Americanish stuff so that she got up and left her seat. Oops.

We didn’t have too much planned so we spent the first few hours walking around the city. There were statues with birds on literally every head, which was really cute because it was just the heads they stood on. We found a nice park where hoards of people were huddled around phones; we soon discovered they were all playing Pokemon Go. Then we walked past some nice shops and a streetperformer playing Mad World with drumsticks and strings tied to his shoes, a mic, and a keyboard. It was pretty funny looking but he was quite good!

Liverpool is home to The Beatles (think Penny Lane and The Caravan Club) so we went to The Magical Beatles Museum. It was £15 but definitely worth it, even for uncultured millenials like ourselves. There were artifacts from the smallest, insignificant events to really really rare collectables. There were three floors of different time periods and each played music from the different styles. It’s amazing to think how amazingly successful they became and how Paul McCartney is probably still not able to comprehend their absolute success in the music world. There’s even a little alley in Liverpool dedicated to music and The Beatles. It was cute because it was filled with middle aged people who were clearly reliving The Beatles era in themed musical pubs. While I’m not the biggest Beatles fan, seeing how many people flocked to that area on a Sunday afternoon in the rain really said something about their music.

After the museum, and when the rain began to pick up, we decided we still wanted to go to the beach, despite the mistiness hanging over us. It was interesting seeing the houses outside of the city. British houses are very clustered together and they all look very similar. The ones near Liverpool looked like they rarely saw a day without rain but with all the different colored paint, they really made the neighborhoods cute. Our Uber driver dropped us off at Crosby Beach, which is quite a huge sand beach. The tide was low and we could barely see the water from the bluff we were standing on to give you an idea of how far away the water was. We thought there were a good number of people hanging out on the sand, but it turns out that an artist cast 100 brass nude statues of himself in 2005 and placed around the shoreline. While it is slightly controversial (because he literally sculpted everrrrything), it has increased tourism to the beach. And I could see why.. it was eerily intriguiing to see so many statues in the water and stretching down the shoreline.

We ordered another Uber as we desperately tried to wipe wet sand off of our shoes, mine being my nice new white trainers (sneakers). Ice cream was on our mind and we found this shake place called sBlended. I got an oreo milkshake while Claire and Sarah got these super fancy specialty concoctions that I was admittedly jealous of after getting my averge cookies and cream. After our shakes, some tea (to not be rude at the cafe we sat down at to drink our shakes), and some leftover pizza, we moved on to yet another place for drinks. The Brass Monkey was the most hipster little pub I’ve ever been in. I did not order a drink as my bladder was about to burst, but Claire and Sarah did and they looked real good. We ended the night with another 30 minutes back home, the perfect day trip to our first week in rainy old England.