Premier Apartments, where we're staying

Lex outside the library, next to the World Museum

Liverpool has many statues!

This is the memorial to the Hillsborough Stadium disaster, where 96 people died

Thursday, 28th August                 LIVERPOOL

Robyn writes: We spent some time this morning investigating a day trip to Manchester - we'd seen a canal boat trip from here which sounded great....until we discovered there were no more this week. Bugger. Then we looked into off-peak train tickets, which would have been okay, but in the end we couldn't find any bus tours of the city on today, and the boat cruise I found was 30 pounds each for two hours, so in the end we decided to stay put and finish looking at Liverpool!


Our first port of call today was the World Museum, which is just around the corner from us, but in the opposite direction to the river front, so I'd never actually been there. It's in one of the most impressive parts of Liverpool, where there are these beautiful huge old public buildings and monuments all together (miraculously having survived the wartime bombing nearby). The museum has retained the old frontage, but the building behind is much more modern. The original Liverpool Museum was badly damaged in 1941 by bombs and they lost a lot of their collection. But the rebuild is great and works really well, and fortunately they still do have many treasures. Their Egyptian collection is the best we've seen outside of the British Museum in this country - apparently lots of wealthy Liverpudlian Victorians were heavily into Egyptology, and several of their collections have ended up in the museum. It's a real family museum with excellent displays of dinosaurs, space, live insects etc etc, and being school holidays, was packed with children having a wonderful time. Good to see! (I can't wait until Louie is old enough to get into dinosaurs....)


We had lunch in the museum cafe then continued our look around the galleries, before meeting up again and heading over to St George's Hall. This is a huge and beautiful classical building across the road, and we'd been told we must go in and see its glorious interior and ceiling in particular, but alas, there was a formal occasion underway (it looked rather like a debutante ball, perhaps) so we couldn't barge on in! Anyway, we had a good walk around the area and admired the various statues, including Wellington up high on his pedestal, Victoria and Albert on their horses and several other of the Victorian great and good. We've observed that it was very much a Victorian hobby to put up statues of the great and good by public subscription - poor things must have always had their hands in their pockets to contribute to yet another memorial. By now the clouds had cleared and it was a beautiful, sunny day.


Lex wanted to go to another art gallery but I headed home to put my feet up then start the dreaded chore of packing. It was ridiculously hot today - got to 20 degrees! When he got home we organised photos etc, fought (unsuccessfully) with the blog program to try to get it to upload photos, and tried to finish as much packing as possible (at least we both have ports of clean clothes now) then he suggested we go out for tea, as it's our last night in Liverpool. First we went to our 'local', the Ship &  Mitre for a drink. Lex tried one of their many real cask ales on tap. He was impressed. Then we wandered down through the CBD and all around there for a look - another area I hadn't been into. We found a super big Tesco there so popped in to get a few things our local doesn't have, then kept looking for a place to eat. We ended up setting on Tai Pan, a Chinese smorgasbord restaurant with all you could eat for 12.50 pounds. Not too bad for value - we both had three courses and of course could have had more. They had a huge variety including hot and cold dishes, sushi, seafood, all of the usual Chinese buffet type dishes and some lovely desserts too. We're still full!


We got home just in time to watch the latest "Who do you think you are?" on BBC1 - tonight it was Brendan O'Carroll (Mrs Brown's Boys) and I can definitely recommend this program when it comes on Australian TV. We were particularly interested as we'd seen information about his family in the museum in Dublin, and he investigates the murder of his grandfather in Dublin during the War of Independence. Very interesting what he discovers.


Tomorrow we're off to Oxford for three nights, so in the morning we are picking up our last hire car for the trip, which we'll have until we return it to Heathrow the weekend after next. Not long now! Liverpool has certainly been a highlight, but I can't wait to see what Oxford is like (after all of those years of watching 'Morse' and 'Lewis'!)