Well then, back to it.
The next day (the 21st) we decided to split up. Orion, Jonathan and I (the guys) wanted to see the inside of the Tower of London, but Rieke didn’t want to so she went shopping instead. We took the underground from Kensel Green (where our hostel was) and we made it one stop before they announced that we all had to get off the underground because the line that we needed to take was closed due to either maintenance or signaling problems. I don’t remember which. We then waited around for about 40 minutes until the next overground came. We had to take that to another station in order to finally catch the underground.
While Rieke went to Piccadilly Circus where she was going to go shopping, the rest of us went to the Tower, but found that the lines were extremely long. Since the others didn’t want to wait in line that long to see it and I didn’t really want to split up from them, we ended up going to the HMS Belfast instead which is a permanently docked cruiser that was used during WWII and is now a museum. It was just across the Thames from where the Tower is. It was enormous. We spent a couple of hours going through it and we didn’t even get to see the whole thing because we had to leave to meet Rieke.
We caught the underground then met Rieke at Elephant and Castle. From there we went to the Imperial War Museum. I found it to be interesting for a while, but after about 2 hours, I started getting extremely bored with it. We spent several hours there mainly going through the WWI and WWII sections. We eventually had to leave because they were closing.
After we left the museum, we decided to try and find the Hard Rock Cafe in London because that was one thing that Orion really really wanted to do. We went to the underground station at Elephant and Castle and asked someone there. After being redirected to different people, we eventually got our answer. We had to go to Hyde Park Corner. We took the underground there, then we ended up walking the wrong direction and eventually stopping into a shop and asked directions. As we were heading towards it, a couple of American women (I could tell they were American because of their accent) came up to us and asked us where the Hard Rock Cafe was. We told them we were finding it ourselves. After a short while, we found it. The wait was 2 hours, but Orion desperately wanted to go, so we put our names on the list and went and continued walking down the street (Piccadilly) to see what was there. We eventually found a Starbucks and decided to stop there for a while. Then we went back and went to the Hard Rock Cafe shop next door to the restaurant.
When we finally got in, we had a table in the back corner of the restaurant. I ordered and extremely good hamburger (probably the best I’ve had since coming to Europe) and I tried a new beer that I’ve never tried before. Unfortunately it was quite expensive. It cost something close 20 pounds ($40) each. Afterwards, we headed back to the hostel to take it easy and go to bed early since we had to be up early.
The next day, we got up at 6 or so to catch a bus at 8 to Liverpool. We caught it at Victoria Station. It took about 5 hours to get to Liverpool and I tried to sleep a lot of that time. Once we got there, we sat around for a while at the coach station and decided what to do. We were going to go see a soccer game in Liverpool later that day, but we had several hours to kill before then. Eventually we went to the train station so we could put our bags in lockers (since we had all of our stuff with us and they wouldn’t be allowed in the soccer stadium). It took a while to find the station, but eventually we found and found the place where we could lock up our bags. Then we ate some Burger King for lunch there at the station.
We were considering trying to walk to the soccer stadium, but since we couldn’t find a good map of Liverpool, we ended up just catching a cab from the station. The taxi driver was quite funny. He was difficult to understand because he had such a strong Liverpool accent. He asked us where we were from and what we were doing. We told him we were going to the soccer game and so started a conversation about soccer. In Liverpool there is a rivalry between 2 major soccer teams there: Everton and Liverpool. We were going to see the Everton game. Fortunately, he was an Everton fan so he was thrilled that we were going to see the Everton game. When we told him that later in the day we were going to Manchester, he starting going off about how the people in Manchester are stupid and how stupid the city is. He even said that they should just build a giant wall around the city and use it for testing nuclear weapons. Of course, this all stemmed from soccer since Manchester has another rival team. He did, however, recommend a really nice pub to go to before the game that was within walking distance of the stadium. He also warned us not to go into certain pubs since we were not English and they were full of hooligans.
After we were dropped off at the stadium, we ended up taking his suggestion and went to the pub he recommended. It was a really nice pub called The Abbey. There we had a couple of beers, then headed back to the stadium. We bought scarves with Everton on it (scarves are very popular soccer merchandise) and headed into the stadium. We found our seats quickly. What I didn’t realize about English soccer stadiums is that they don’t allow alcohol in the actual seating and they don’t serve alcohol once the game begins. I guess that is to try to minimize the amount of fighting that goes on after games. Jonathan didn’t realize that until after he had already bought a beer from a stand. The game itself was quite fun, but seemed to go by quickly.
After the game, we started walking back towards the train station since it was almost impossible to get a cab. Along the way I noticed that about every 5-10 feet there was at least one police officer along both sides of the street as well as police on horses. After walking a while, we found a whole string of cabs just sitting there, so we caught one back to the station. This driver was also as animate about soccer as the last one. He asked if we went to the Everton game, we said yes and he became quite excited. He started ranting about how much Everton sucks (he was a Liverpool fan). Since Jonathan was really the only one who knows anything about the teams, he started arguing with the cab driver and it just kept escalating. It was quite amusing and stayed in good humor though. He dropped us off at the train station where we picked up our bags, then walked to the bus station to catch our bus to Manchester. We had about an hour to kill, so we sat around at the same place we sat earlier in the day.
The bus ride to Manchester only took about 2 hours. When we go there, we were surprised to find that it looked a whole like Denver and almost nothing like any other European city I’ve been to. It didn’t take us long to find our hostel with the help of one of the bus station employees. After checking into the hostel and dropping off our stuff, we went for a walk around the city just to see it. It was dark by then, however, so we didn’t stay out long. We then went back to the hostel and went to bed pretty much right away.
I think that’ll do for this entry. There isn’t much left, so there should only be one more part to this unlike the Christmas entries.
