AG Travel Diaries: Liverpool Part 1!!

Hey guys!! Since I’ve just returned from an amazing trip to Liverpool, I’m delivering you all another instalment from my travel series. Liverpool is a major city in the U.K which formerly clutched the European Capital of Culture title back in 2008 and me and my family travelled down there via train for a 3 day city break. It’s about 2 and half hours away from Hull by train and I immensely enjoyed exploring Liverpool and immersing myself in it’s culture. Today’s post will focus on the first two days of our break and next week’s post will concentrate on the last day of our trip.

DAY 1

For a majority of the morning, we travelled across to Liverpool on a train from Hull to Huddersfield and then Huddersfield to Liverpool. It was an amazing feeling to walk across to the hotel and absorb the atmosphere of Liverpool for the first time and like always whilst experiencing a destination for the first time, I enjoyed an indescribable feeling of excitement. Once we’d checked into the Premier Inn hotel we were residing in and dumped our bags, it was finally time to investigate Liverpool’s shopping scene. For about 3 hours, we shopped at pretty much all our favourite stores and as a shopping addict, I was impressed with all the shops that Liverpool had to offer. It hosted stores like Pull and Bear and Forever 21 which I’d never shopped at before so I relished the opportunity to shop at these new places. For tea that night, we were all craving pizza so we decided upon Bella Italia which turned out to be an extremely good choice. I ordered a Strawberry Lemonade Mocktail and shared a Barbecue Chicken pizza and a pepperoni pizza with my mum and sister and everything tasted absolutely amazing. All this great food was a great way to end the day.

Liverpool’s shopping area

My strawberry Lemonade Mocktail

DAY 2

For day 2, we explored the Albert Docks and all that area had to offer. The weather of day 1 had been gloriously hot with lots of sun so day 2’s weather was a let down with grey skies dominating any sun and some rainy showers later on. However, thankfully, it stayed dry until 2 o’clock which was extremely lucky. Albert Dock was extremely picturesque and perfectly crafted to capture photos of. Our tour around Albert Dock started with a trip on the Liverpool wheel. It reminded me a lot of the wheel that visited Chesterfield in it’s design and size. We experienced three rotations on the wheel and enjoyed the incredible views over Liverpool.

The views from the wheel

Next was the Tate Liverpool Art Gallery. There were different exhibits spread over the 4 separate floors and all of them were really unique. The ground floor hosted ‘Ken’s Show: Exploring the unseen’ and it featured some of the Art Handling Manager turned curator Ken Simon’s favourite art work in celebration of his 30 years at Tate Liverpool. The first and second floors were home to the ‘Constellations’ exhibit, encouraging links to be explored between between major modern and contemporary art work that had been chosen for its revolutionary effect on this field of art work. There was also a section dedicated to art work connected with mental health on the first floor and a whole gallery filled with work by Roy Lichtenstein on the second floor in an exhibit entitled ‘Artist Rooms: Roy Liechtenstein in focus’. Up on the fourth floor, a carnival theme had been adopted with an exhibit called ‘Opavivará’ which the public could interact with. It was split off into 3 sections with a massive, rainbow coloured hammock suspended from the roof in the first room which people were invited to crawl across and relax on. In the second room, an assortment of red, white and black roller ink was available to decorate your body with. In the final room, there was a mixture of ingredients to create your own tea with. Overall, I enjoyed studying all the art work and diving into a wide range of different exhibits with unique themes and ideas. Also, it was extremely fun to relax on the hammock of the fourth floor with my sister and to attempt to create my own tea even though it tasted awful in the end.

Art work from ‘Ken’s Show: Exploring the unseen

Mental Health art

Art work from ‘Constellations’

Art work from ‘Artist Rooms: Roy Lichtenstein in focus

The rainbow hammock

The body paints

My dismal attempt at tea

The array of tea ingredients

After that, we headed towards the museum of Liverpool. Overall, it had 3 floors to it but since the top floor wasn’t really to our interest, we only investigated the first two floors. The ground floor was separated into two sections about Liverpool’s trade history and it’s Chinese areas. Similar to Hull, Liverpool was and still is a major trading city of the UK with docks to import and export goods from all over the world. I found it very interesting delving into Liverpool’s trade history past and learning some more about the city as a whole. The Chinese section was really intriguing as I never knew that there was a Chinese community of Liverpool before. One of my favourite facts from this exhibit was that aside from seafaring, laundry was the second highest employer for Chinese men until the 1940s. The second floor granted you with an overview of Liverpool’s whole history with key dates mentioned like in 1880 when it became a city. To conclude, I really enjoyed wandering around the museum and absorbing lots of information and facts about Liverpool’s history. The street next to the Museum of Liverpool was so picturesque that it would’ve blended in perfectly in London. I had a great time capturing photos of it and proceeding to conduct a mini photo shoot with my sister for a little bit after we exited the museum.

The Piermaster’s house was our next location and perfectly illustrated how a Wartime house of a working class family would’ve appeared. Over the years since it was first constructed in 1852, many Piermaster’s had resided there and made sure ships could enter and leave the docks at high tide. I really enjoyed peeking at what life must’ve been like for a family similar to mine during the war and what the housing was like back then.

Our final stop for the day was the Merseyside Maritime Museum and the International Slavery Museum joint building. As it wasn’t long before the museums were going to close for the day by the time we reached them, we only managed to squeeze in time for one exhibit about smuggling and taxes. I must admit that these are two topics which up until then I had little knowledge about but I learnt about them from the exhibit and I found it so fascinating. It was amazing how far some people go just to smuggle certain items into the country and it certainly put me at ease with the amount of measures that are administered to prevent this.

For our tea that night, we decided to step out of our comfort zone and try out Wagamama which is an international cuisine restaurant. I savored a delicious meal of chicken and prawn noodles which I would definitely eat again. Although, I was uncertain about Wagamama at first, I was extremely pleased that we chose to try it out in the end.

Thank you for reading this post!! Where have you been on holiday recently? Let me know in the comments!! Part 2 will be out next week but until then bye for now!!

Amelia Grace a.k.a Amelia in Hull.