Liverpool Part 1

"There are places I remember all my life, though some have changed. Some forever, not for better, some have gone and some remain." - The Beatles, In My Life

Mini Lambananas: £5.

What’s a Lambanana you ask? It’s exactly what it sounds like - a lamb-banana. Even though the artist (Taro Chiezo) is Japanese and based in Manhattan, Lambananas, as we found out, have apparently become Liverpudlian. The most famous Lambanana in Liverpool is the 8-ton, 14-foot-tall superlambanana statue, which then spawned smaller statues that are posed around the city. There are also now extra-mini, portable statues that I like to call babylambananas. Four local artists decided to create the herd of lambananas to live in Liverpool in part because both lambs and bananas were common cargos that came through the ports. They are also a statement about how dangerous genetic engineering is.

I’m still mad I didn’t buy the babylambanana, but I have had fun compiling a list of other possible combination statues.

orange-utan (orange + orangutan)
raspbirdy (raspberry + bird)
kiwangaroo (kiwi fruit + kangaroo)
Mangoat (mango + goat)
Pearguin (pear + penguin)
Lemonemur (lemon + lemur)
Grapeiraffe (grape + giraffe)

And my personal favorite (though maybe not the prettiest combination):

Coconewt (coconut + newt)

Felicia, Lindsay and I ended up on a six-hour coach ride to Liverpool one Friday afternoon with mixed reasons for going. I, already an anglophile and travel-addict, wanted to see more of the country, and Lindsay had long nursed an obsession with the Beatles. Felicia landed somewhere in the middle, so we decided to go. Even though we were bussing almost across the entire country (to the horror of many of our English friends), England is only about the size of Florida and could fit in the US a little over 75 times, so it really didn’t seem far to us. By train it would only be two or three hours (but about 50 pounds more).

On the Metropolitan Line on our way to the Coach station

We got there in the evening after the sun had set and began the search for our hotel, laden with over-packed backpacks, purses and duffel bags. We made our way down the main stretch, past crowded pubs and massive, flood-lit buildings with columns and banners that had a stately, slightly intimidating feel, finally turning onto one of the smaller, more pedestrian roads. The road was narrow and there was a mix of chain coffee stores, smaller, charming restaurants, up scale souvenir stores and bars, with smaller roads shooting off toward busier pubs and music venues each block. After a slight (unintended) detour to the end of the road, we backtracked and found Base2Stay - our lovely, modern looking hotel.

We settled in and changed before hitting the streets again with a post-it-note list of good pubs and bars from Joe (my flatmate from Liverpool).

We found the first one, Heebie Jeebies, as it was starting to fill up. It had a good mix of classic music and newer songs, so we sat for a bit before moving on and finding another on the list called Mojo. Their motto, “Music for the People,” glowed red in a neon sign over the bar, and true to their promise they played older, classic music like The Beatles. We grabbed drinks and sat at a huge booth near the corner. The boys at the other end of the table heard our accents because, let’s face it, my voice carries, and slid over on either side next to Felicia and me to chat.

Side Note: it’s interesting to me that people rarely appreciate the value of their hometown, because the draws of places like Liverpool, London or Amsterdam are so obvious to me. Even my own home-area in Southern California has charm that is worth seeing in my opinion. The boys we were talking to could not believe that we were visiting Liverpool - they thought we were insane to travel north to the Merseyside town from London. Beyond The Beatles (it has always been a rather musical city apparently), it has one of the most beautiful cathedrals in the country, is an incredibly old port city and has quite a few interesting museums, including a branch of the Tate. If I can see charms in Chino Hills where the biggest (only?) claims to fame are that The Bench Warmers was filmed there and Bikini Girl from American Idol is from there, they should certainly be able to appreciate Liverpool.

We moved on to a pub down the street with a welcoming look. We had been looking for a pub called The Flute but couldn’t find it, and the large windows and crowd drew us into this one. It looked like a restaurant one would find on a coast of somewhere beautiful, and had a lively, open feel to it. We left after a bit when it got too crowded to move and made our way back to stop at Mojo and Heebie Jeebies before changing and curling up in our feather beds at our hotel.

The next morning Lindsay went to The Beatles museum while Felicia and I explored the streets and docks of Liverpool. We were going on a 100-pound, all-day Beatles tour the next day so Felicia and I didn’t have much money left to spare on the moptops. Plus, we only had two full days in the city and one of them gone to the tour, which didn’t leave a lot of time to see things.

It was a cold, overcast morning - the kind that I love. People were walking slowly through the streets, cozy in their pea coats and scarves, enjoying their morning coffees. We worked our way back up from our hotel to the street with the shops, stopping in a few of them before following the gently sloping streets towards the Mersey. (The river that runs through northwest England into the Irish Sea) We stopped in the John Lewis Department Store to warm up: the inside looks exactly like Macy’s only people had accents.

The Pier Head is further down on the waterfront from Albert Docks. The three famous buildings on the head, the Royal Liver Building, the Cunard Building and the Port of Liverpool Building, are visible through the gaps between the stocky brick structures and short red pillars of Albert dock.

Albert Dock - The Pier Head is behind us in this photo.

The Museum of Liverpool is situated in between Albert Dock and the Pier Head and can also be seen from the walkway along the water. It was opened in July 2011 and has crinkled white sides and a distinctive geometric design. The Liverpool Cathedral, a massive sandstone building, rises shrouded in mist far away at a higher point in the city. As you look up at the landmark buildings, it feels like you can see the whole of the city from the waterfront.

We walked along the docks, enjoying the salty breeze coming off the water and the overcast day before heading down one of the covered walkways toward the Tate Liverpool. They were having an Alice in Wonderland exhibition, and, since the Dreams and the Gerhard

Richter exhibitions at the Tate Modern in London had been so good, we were interested in seeing this one. The exhibit had been arranged to coincide with the 150 anniversary of the book's conception, and Liverpool seemed a fitting city since (as we learned the next day) John Lennon was quite the Wonderland fanatic and wrote a few of his songs based on Carol’s famous nonsensical poetry. We bought our tickets and started in the first room on the ground floor.

The works in that room were really abstract and consisted of art work inspired directly by the book. The room was sort of a teaser to the inspiration of the book and following history of it that was represented upstairs on the second floor. One piece that stood out (literally since it was lit up in neon) was a piece by Jason Rhoades that consists of 40 hanging neon words. The words hang from a metal frame attached to the center of the ceiling and seem random, ranging from “flap jacks,” to “of love,” to more crass words. The words were meant to make people think about the scope and meaning of language, and they did. Another piece was simpler: a black line ran around the entire room with a measurement written at different points. The description revealed that the line was painted at the height that Alice reached when she ate the cake that made her grow tall.

Upstairs one could find anything from the abstract sculptures and paintings that preceded the book, to portraits of Lewis Carroll, (or Charles Dodgson as he was named at birth) to manuscripts of the book and the original merchandise created for the first crop of avid Alice fans. One room had boxes full of photocopied pages from random books - title pages, covers, author pages, and parts from the middle of unknown works. Visitors were encouraged to choose five pages to compile a book of their own. The point was interesting, and very fitting for a Lewis Carroll exhibition. Essentially it was challenging the significance and meaning of language and art, which it did. At the end though, you were still left with five random book pages that didn’t really fit together, so we didn’t take any.

While the exhibit was well worth seeing and certainly had interesting pieces, overall it was a little too broad. The common theme was Alice in Wonderland, but in a lot of cases, Alice was used only in name and appearance to convey broad political or social messages. These pieces didn’t seem to fit as well with the manuscripts and more true Alice inspired pieces because they didn’t follow the themes of the work. The Telegraph made an interesting point about that in the end of its review though, saying the broadness in a sense was itself very Carroll-ian.

We left after about an hour since the light was starting to die and wandered further down the waterfront, enjoying the sound of the gentle waves and looking at the statues. A herd of lambananas was penned in a construction zone - unfortunate since we wanted to ride one.

We moved on to the Museum of Liverpool, stopping to search for postcards in the gift shop. Liverpool didn’t have any of the common souvenir shops that most European cities have, which was strange considering its size and prominence in the country. All was forgiven when we found postcards at the Museum for only 20 pence - the cheapest price we had found travelling yet.

Three buildings on the Pier Head

A church across the street from the three buildings on the Pier Head that was identified by a sign as the Church of our Lady and Saint Nicholas, the Anglican parish church of Liverpool. It stood slightly above street level. Under an iron arch was a worn stone staircase leading up to the churchyard. Paths ran through the garden, but since the wind was stronger against the slightly elevated church, we followed the walk straight to the front of the building. Two men were sitting by the door, and very nicely explained that the church was actually turned around and we were at the back, not the front. Most of the church had been destroyed during one of the bombings in World War II, so the latest reconstruction had repositioned the church to face the city, not the port.

A statue of a little boy with a toy airplane running up a staircase while his mother on the bottom step reached for him stood at the back. It was a memorial to the Blitz. An air raid was taking place during

the scene, and the mother needed the boy to come down to take shelter. It was a powerful statue.

We followed the side of the church and found the front door, entering half to see the inside and half to thaw out after being frozen by the bitter wind. The walls were whitewashed with sandstone accents and the gabled wooden roof rose high above us. It was simple but pretty.

We left and headed up away from the water,  ending up back at the shopping street where John Lewis was. This appeared to be the main street because massive Christmas decorations hung from the buildings

and large trees had been erected on stands. People swarmed around the decorations and into stores to do Christmas shopping. We stopped in American Apparel to warm up because our fingers felt like they were about to fall off and reached our hotel to put on warmer clothes just as dusk was deepening.

Salt and Pepper shakers at American Apparel.

Ekaterina (or Ekat as I call her) is a friend of mine from Northern Ireland. I met her when she was studying at MU for a year abroad from her university in Lancaster (where Palak also went) and she came and stayed with my family for a week during Thanksgiving break. She’s sweet, genuine, caring and generally a wonderful friend, so I was thrilled when she said she could take the train to Liverpool to see us.

We met her outside of St. Luke’s Church; also known as the bombed out church. During World War II, the church was hit by a bomb and burned. The stone shell is still standing, and the inside was converted into a garden. What's left of the church now stands as a memorial to the heavy bombing that damaged half of the metropolitan homes in the city and killed about 2,500 people in the area.

Ekat was waiting for us at the top of the steps and the next four hours after we reached her were filled with non-stop chatter.

We went into the church and stopped inside of a small room where we signed a waiver that basically said if what was left of the church decided to fall down on us and we did manage to live, we wouldn’t sue the people who were in charge of the park inside. We continued towards the arched doorway slightly more apprehensively, glancing up for falling gargoyles. Once we were inside we forgot all about falling rocks, partly because there were none to fall (what with no ceiling and all) and partly because it was amazingly beautiful. The odd combination of open air and regal cathedral walls was enchanting. It was dark, and green and red floodlights illuminated the skeletal sides.

After taking in the atmosphere for a while, we left in search of warm food and ended up at a modern looking restaurant on the street with the shops by our hotel. Ekat and I got Guinness and continued to catch up over our drinks. Soon the topic of stolen pub glasses came up. Neither one of us had been brave enough to take a glass yet, but we decided we would each take our glasses to memorialize the visit.

A good 20 minutes after our food was finished we were still working up our nerves. We weren’t exactly in a pub, and waiters were everywhere. We might have been stealing the crown jewels for how nervous we were. Finally, quite a few minutes later, we were out on the street, prizes in hand. It’s now my favorite glass.

The last train to Lancaster left around nine that night, so Lindsay, Ekat and I made our way toward the train station after seeing Felicia back to the hotel because she wasn’t feeling well. One more drink at a pub near the train station and it was time to say a sad goodbye.

Back at the hotel, we fell asleep quickly with thoughts of the next day’s all-day Beatles tour on our minds.

Other Photos

Love the name on it, and love the movie!

Of course

On the Dock

Lindsay at the Tate

Mersey

RLO (Random Liverpool observation)

I was intellectually aware that there is more than one English accent before spending an extended amount of time in London, but now I can actually identify where English accents come from to a medium extent. (Northern, Liverpool, Newcastle, London, Cockney, Posh, etc)

If you’re curious, look up Geordie Shore (Newcastle) and Desperate Scousewives (Liverpool) on youtube.

I still don’t understand how such distinct accents develop in such small areas. For instance, Liverpool has one of the strongest, noticeably different  English accents in the country, and it’s only in that one city. They up-speak nearly every word and add whole new pronunciations that other English people don’t have, not to mention their own class of slang.

It took a while adjusting once we first got to Liverpool to be able to understand what people were saying. The first night when I was trying to order food I had no idea what the guy behind the counter was saying. I had more than exceeded the acceptable amount of “what’s,” meaning no matter how many times I repeated that word I would never understand what he was saying, so I just started saying yes and nodding enthusiastically. I don’t exactly know what he did to my Pad Thai but it was definitely not normal Pad Thai.

Still, I love Liverpool accents. They’re musical, fun to listen to, and I still say, no matter what my flatmates Sam and Joe (who actually has a Liverpool accent) say, it sounds a bit like the Lucky Charms Leprechaun.

London-isms - Where people are from

Scouser - Someone from Liverpool (i.e. “My flatmate Joe is a proud Scouser)
Liverpudlian - another term for someone from Liverpool
Mancunian - someone from Manchester
Lancastrian - someone from Lancaster
Novocastrian - Someone from Newcastle
Gerdie - another term for someone from Newcastle
Yorkie - someone from Yorkshire
Londoner - someone from London
British - someone from the British Isles (don’t call Scottish people English - they are British or Scottish)