Sunny Liverpool

I'd firstly like to congratulate Virgin Trains for providing me with the opportunity to visit Liverpool and for returning me home only an hour late, which is a whole half-hour less than journey which resulted in me receiving this ticket in the first place. That's progress*.

Firstly, Liverpool town centre is beautiful, granted it was a pretty grey weekend, but it's a much more beautiful town centre than any I've walked through in London. Mostly beautiful old building, with the newer ones, in most cases, seamlessly added in.

The waterfront area was very nice too, although much of the construction work detracted from all it's glory (shouldn't this have been done before it became city of culture?)I visited the Liverpool Museum, took a look at the slavery exhibit, the Liverpool Tate Modern. Interesting stuff.

Unfortunatly the outskirts, the suburbs, are not so, well, nice. My B&B was a little out of the way, I knew that, but I didn't know quite how far away. On my multimap printout it seemed just a short walk. But my map was across two different pages each piece only showing the turns of the journey. They did not show the very, very long road that connected them.

The maps were also wrong. They didn't mention that the elongated Prescott Road, stopped being Prescott Road and changed to Kensington Road, before reverting back to being Prescott Road (It was actually Prescott Street, but that was wrong too). So after deciding to continue on to Kensington, having decided it was probably the right way, I went on. And on. And on. I'm going for miles on a road that might not even be the right road.

Eventually I asked someone and it turned out I was on the right track, but by this time I'd entered the wilderness. Boarded houses, metal shutters, curry house after Chinese after Indian after betting shop. Passed a 24 hour off-license called 'Not Drunk Enough'. And there were chavs and scallies and they were everywhere!

And the people were ugly. I was waiting for a bus, a dozen people there with me, and I was the most attractive person there. This was a unique experience for me. Granted, it was a bit like getting the 2nd prize at a beauty contest card in Monopoly when you're playing with your Gran, but it was a unique experience nevertheless.

So in summation, visit Liverpool, but stay in the town centre, dear god, don't leave the city centre.

And try not to take the train if you can avoidit.

*It was a track power failure so I suppose that's not their fault, although I'm not sure who to blame for the farcical misinformation that was a great deal less funny to all the people who got on at Birmingham, sat down, and were then told to get off again.