It was about ten in the morning when I arrived in Chester, England. I had hitchhiked with an English ventriloquist from Conwy, Wales and it was shaping up to be a beautiful sunny day. Chester, home to Mr. Daniel Craig, was similar to Conwy in that it sported brilliantly preserved ancient walls around the city, though these were even older, dating back to the Holy Roman Empire. Having hiked up a mountain the previous day, my backpack was feeling heavier than usual on my shoulders. Wanting to explore the city unburdened, I went to the train station searching for luggage lockers, but found none. I then popped into a few nearby hotels to inquire about holding my luggage but none were willing to do me the favor. One hotel concierge brushed me off by saying they couldn’t take my backpack for insurance reasons, and two others said for terrorism reasons. Defeated by their paranoia, I set out to explore Chester with my pack weighing heavily on my sore legs.
The first thing I did was climb an old stone staircase and explored the ancient walls to get an elevated view of the winding city streets. I walked until I reached the imposing East Gate, the historic main entrance to the Roman fortress of Deva built over 1800 years ago! The gate was adorned with a beautiful golden clock with a fascinating array of exposed cogs and gears, dating back to 1899 as a commemoration for Queen Victoria’s diamond jubilee.
As I stood atop that tall gate listening to the soothing ticking of the old clock, I saw something rather interesting happening below on the street. There was a man dressed in Roman battle armor, complete with a horsehair legionnaire helmet, sword, and shield, leading a small army of shield-toting school children wearing matching shoulder pauldrons. The Roman legionnaire was shouting a marching cadence from the front that was hysterically echoed by the squeaky squad of little hoplites behind him: “Left, hut, left, hut – LEFT RIGHT LEFT!” I couldn’t stop laughing when I saw them; something about the matching outfits, the adolescent discipline, and the audacity of marching so verbosely down the middle of a crowded pedestrian street just struck a chord with me.
Coming down off the city walls, I explored the bustling cobblestone streets of Chester’s oldest district where Christmas markets and festive buskers were in full swing. I even walked through a beautiful old church that was showcasing beautiful displays of The Chronicles of Narnia to raise money. Chester was a lovely old town full of high spirits and jovial music, but Liverpool was my ultimate destination for the day, so after an impromptu lunch from an outdoor vendor, I returned to the lockerless train station and made my way to Liverpool.
My old study abroad school friend Luke lived in Liverpool and had offered to let me stay with him. His house was unfortunately, a bit difficult to find as the address he provided me lead me to the front door of a retirement home where I awkwardly wandered around for half an hour asking people in their nineties where I might find my twenty-year-old friend. I finally managed to get Luke on the phone and he met me in front of the retirement home laughing hysterically at my mistake. He led me up the road about a hundred feet to his house, curiously located in the middle of a divided four-lane road. Luke’s home was full of warmth and buzzing energy; he lived with his parents, older brother and sister, his girlfriend that he met while teaching in China, and the laziest cat in the world. Luke, being well travelled, had a simplified Liverpolian accent that was quite easy to understand. His family, however, as nice as they all were, had such strong accents that I was constantly looking to Luke for translations of what they were saying.
As Luke had to work in the morning, I went on my own to explore downtown Liverpool, though thankfully this time without the burden of a forty-pound backpack. I started by wandering in and out of a series of museums around the city, some major highlights being playing with snakes in the Natural History Museum, touching a forgery of the Mona Lisa in the Walker Art Gallery, and napping in an Egyptian pharaoh’s throne in the World Culture Museum.
After a bit of searching, I finally found Mathew Street, a narrow stone road steeped in musical lore where the Beatles famously got their start playing amateur shows. I walked along the road until I found the Cavern Pub, the place I thought was where the Beatles played in their early days. The inside was dimly lit and indeed lavishly decorated with Beatles memorabilia, though it was curiously empty for what I had assumed would be a major tourist attraction. I had a nice lunch and a pint there but was honestly a bit underwhelmed by the place. As I left the Cavern Pub, I saw an orange neon sign directly across the street with the glowing words Cavern Club. A stream of people was pouring into the door and I followed them inside where four flights of stairs lead deep underground to a packed dance floor in front of a live Beatles cover band. THIS was more like it; THIS where the Beatles got their start, not the little pub across the street. I stayed there and enjoyed the music and drinks for a couple hours, feeling properly immersed in the Beatlemania culture.
It was late and proper dark outside when I finally emerged again from the Cavern Club. I continued to explore aimlessly, meandering through Liverpool’s massive outdoor shopping district, in and out of little Christmas markets, and finally found myself on the beautifully lit and tranquilly still Albert Docks on the edge of the city. Home to a host of quirky little knick knack shops, high-end bars, the Liverpool Cultural Museum, and a handful of gorgeously lit sailboats, the Albert Docks were definitely one of my favorite areas of Liverpool. I eventually made my way by bus back to Luke’s house where he proposed we go out for drinks to a nearby club. Now, this wasn’t the nightclub kind of club, this was a fancy snooker club that Luke happened to be a member of. So with gin and tonics in hand, Luke and I set about playing a few rounds of snooker together. It’s a fun and interesting game that required a great deal of skill, skill that I unfortunately lacked. But it was a fun time nonetheless, and Luke insisted that I hadn’t embarrassed myself too badly for my first time playing snooker.
The next day I slept in luxuriously late and went with Luke around lunchtime to a local sports pub to watch a Liverpool football (soccer) game with a crowd of rowdy locals. The atmosphere throughout the game was a cacophony of drunken swears and cheers, though sadly the game ended in a 2-1 loss for the home team. After drowning our sorrows a bit at the pub, we went out for another night of snooker, which went surprisingly better for me than the day before.
It had been a truly fun and relaxing few days for me in Liverpool, but with only a few days before my flight out of London, it was time for me to move on. Luke and his family drove me to the train station the next morning, and after a long heartfelt goodbye to my kind hosts, I hopped on a train headed for the neighboring major city of Manchester.