Day 32 - 12 September - Liverpool

Today's train trip is to Liverpool.  The train we caught to Liverpool was with Northern Trains who appear to mostly run quite small trains - ours had only two carriages.  When we got onto the train there were only about three other passengers on the train, and two of them got off at the next station!  However, as we got closer to Liverpool more people got on - people who were obviously going to spend the day there shopping etc. To be fair, there's a good reason for this - if you're not a tourist and you therefore care how long the trip takes, you could leave Manchester 33 minutes later on a faster TransPennine train that has only a couple of stops in between and arrive in Liverpool at basically the same time as we arrived!

We got off the train at the end of the line - Liverpool Lime Street - and although we had planned to go straight to the docks we got side-tracked by some large old buildings close by.  I remember being surprised in the USA by what almost appears to be almost a cult around Abraham Lincoln, and Wellington definitely has the same sort of profile in England.  The statue on top of this enormous plinth is of course Wellington, dwarfing the nearby statue you can see which is merely of Queen Victoria.

We had considered getting a local train to take us closer to the docks but it was actually quite an easy walk through the main shopping area to the docks.  We wandered around the Albert Docks for a while, then walked to the Mersey Ferry company - of course, to take a ferry across the Mersey.  

Basically the ferry took us well down the river then across to two separate stops where they have other attractions you can look at for an extra fee of course - a "spaceport" for kids and then a display around a WW2 U-Boat, then back across the river to where we started.  The ticket allows you to get off the ferry at any of these spots and get back on later but we didn't bother.  This is the ferry:

During the trip there's a pre-recorded talk about all the buildings and also some of the history of the city.

After the ferry ride we had a look through the Museum of Liverpool.  As I had been led to believe, it had a really detailed and well put together display about the history of Liverpool, from prehistory through to the current times.  This is the outside of the Museum - it only opened in 2011 and has won some awards although all it proves to me is that I prefer to look at old buildings!

After the museum, we walked back to the Albert Docks and took a ride on the Liverpool Wheel which gave us some nice views across the river and the city. There's no commentary on the wheel but having already seen the museum and heard the commentary on the ferry we had  reasonable idea of what we were seeing.   Here's the expected tourist photo of us:

I discovered here quite unintentionally that there is apparently a bit of competitiveness between Liverpool and Manchester; the young lady who took the photo on the wheel detected that we're tourists (not sure how!) and when I said that we were staying in Manchester she was very quick to question me about whether I thought Liverpool or Manchester was better.  Fortunately I managed to come up with something along the lines that they're quite different - which is quite true.  Overall, Liverpool is not a beautiful city - at least, not the bits we saw - but it has a long and interesting history.  Manchester is also not beautiful but is also very different; the buildings and the infrastructure at least around the centre of the city don't really resemble each other at all.  And, pedestrians in Liverpool have far less of a death wish as compared to the never-ending amazement you can get watching people cross the road in Manchester - although I didn't mention that :-)