So, right now I am in Lancaster in Northern England at International Summer School. I take a different class every week dealing with the History of England with tons of assignments to supplement it. That is the bad part. The good part is for the most part the subject matter is interesting. This week we studied Roman Britain. It was a nice trip down memory lane from Latin in high school. I am the ONLY History major in the entire program. Everyone is either Econ or Science of some sort.
We went to two different parts of Hadrian's wall on Wednesday. The wall was built by the Emperor Hadrian to mark what he considered the end of civilization. It is 20 ft tall and 10 ft wide and we saw a tiny tiny tiny bit half buried underground. That was annoying. But, we did get to go to an archaeology dig where they had just unearthed a temple to Jupiter which was a HUGE deal. They were freaking out and could not stop talking about it. Any question we asked somehow related back to the temple, despite being the only one in England so that was funny.
Saturday three of us decided to go to Liverpool. We got there about lunch time and they went to a Maritime museum and I decided to do what any tourist to Liverpool would do, go on a Beatles tour. The bus driver was named John and the tour guide was George and that was just the beginning. Beatles music was blaring all over the bus and the guide was singing just as loud. He was an obvious fan of John and got moved to tears when talking about his death. He has to do that tour at least once a day. I guess time does not heal all wounds. I am not gonna lie it was a little awkward going on a bus tour by myself, but I sat next to a German family who had been to Delaware and were appalled that I had never been. On the tour we went to each of their homes, their school, up Penny Lane where we saw the barber shop with the photographs as well as the corner bank (bought by a chain now of course) and the shelter in the middle of the roundabout (now being converted into a cafe called Sgt. Pepper's). Then we went to Strawberry Fields which is actually a children's home John Lennon used to play at not a beautiful field of strawberries in the middle of industrial Liverpool. After that we went to Brian Epstein's house then to the church were the Quarrymen played and John and Paul met. We went to their colleges and then ended up at the Cavern club where they played 292 times as well as the Rolling Stones, The Who, and Elton John. Cilla Black was a waitress there at the time and there is a funny picture of her and George dancing in the corner. Besides John they really where rag to riches stories. George's house was tiny as was Ringo's. Paul's was a typical British home but still nothing fancy. John and Paul's houses are now owned by the National Trust but John's house until he was five, Ringo's two houses, and George's house are all still lived in by normal people. George's is actually a council house still so people get assigned to live there. The people next door (attached to the house though) had blackout glass because of the tourist. It was just so cool to see everything and here the story of how everything just fit together. It really was just musically talented kids that got connected by mutual friends.
After that I met the other people and we went to the Tate Liverpool. It is all modern sculpture. It was weird. There were some exhibits that we had also seen in Amsterdam, but others were just interesting. My favorite had to be the live art. There was an old film reel by Gilbert and George called "Gordon's makes us Drunk". It was a movie of them drinking gin and tonics and smoking cigs getting more and more drunk. It was in real time and was five hours long. I watched the beginning which was hilarious because it was just them sitting there in their 1960s suits staring at each other smoking. There was another one with a glass of water on a glass platform very high up. Under it where a painting would be hung was a plaque of a conversation between the interviewer and the artist where the artist says that is not a glass of water it is a tree.
Then we went to the Beatles museum because the other girls had been to the maritime museum not the bus tour. It was pretty much the bus tour with pictures of everything instead of the live thing, but they did have some of their guitars and John's glasses and more of the story about after they left Liverpool.
I really loved Liverpool. It is a great city with a great focus on tourists. They are in their year for Capital of Culture for the EU so that is big and they just finished an area with other 600 shops with everything you can ever want. The only thing was it is about 60 miles from Lancaster to Liverpool and public transportation travel time total for the day was 6 hours. I miss my car. Actually I miss Katie, Allison, or Stella coming to pick me up or Sewanee where walking 15 min from Gorgas is something to complain about or driving to Shenanigans is normal. And I miss sun.
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