liverpudlian birthdays

Liverpool is a really interesting city with purple bins!

We left nottingham at 7am and halfway through the journey we rode into dense, dense fog on the motorways up north. the freezing journey was made no warmer by the coach's heating system for a long time, as we couldn't figure out how to use it until the last hour, and it certainly was made no easier by the whining, whingeing blonde postgrad who seemed to think not only that i was personally responsible and accountable for the cold, but that i couldn't feel it and was not trying to do anything about it. some people need to be thrown off buses.

The docks at liverpool were also shrouded in fog, adding a gorgeous mood to the day, if making it feel a lot colder than the forecast had predicted and i was prepared for.

Our first destiation was to pose on the anchor and take moody photos of boats, before heading to the tate modern to enjoy modern art and fruit crumpets. tasty. on the way to our next destination we stumbled across a fudge shop and by the end of the day i had eaten 150g of fudge. no wonder i was so sugary-happy.

Of course liverpool is beatles heaven. i like the music, but am not so fussed about finding out everything anyone could possibly ever want to know, so i gave the beatles story (an hour and a half audio tour around a museum) a miss, and went to stock up on japanese food at the chinese supermarket, and to see the cathedral, or what we could from ground level, considering the fog was still much around us.

The cathedral was a truly impressive structure, and we sat awhile listening to the choir practice for the evenings singing, with the choirmaster's accusatory voice carrying well. the stained glass got an obligatory photo shoot, albeit a little surreptitiously as no photos were strictly meant to be taken during a service, which the choir practice counted as one.

Lunch was eaten at what was recommended to melanie as the best chinese restaurant in the UK. it must have changed management. let's leave it there.

And to finish off, we went to the philharmonic pub, an old pub with many rooms and the fanciest urinals in any english pub. yes, women were allowed to see them (with an escort) and take photos and pose. the marble and brass taps were nicely fancy for a pub toilet.


My birthday passed nicely with a trip to nottingham castle and a good view afforded over nottingham. it was eerily similar to standing in the grounds of cabot tower in bristol, other than that the view was a bit more industrialised and lacking in welsh hills. We ate lunch in the first pub of england, "ye olde trip to jerusalem" - pie and nice ale, with a free portion of rather nice chips as the meal was 40 minutes in the making. In the evening we made sushi and made 3 attempts at baking cake and brownies for the next day's "north pole" party. the only thing north pole about it in the end was that we were north of the equator, i am a Pole, and we were wearing coats with hoods. it was fun :)