Around the world!: Liverpool Fun

Hello all,

We're just back from a very nice weekend in Liverpool. We left here early yesterday and made the 3 hour drive in good time. We spent the afternoon walking around downtown Liver-land. It's an interesting place. There are some really beautiful buildings, and then whole blocks of the city that are filled with empty shells of buildings, with broken windows and boarded up doors. There is definitely a 'gritty' side there. The buildings that had been restored were beautiful, but it's hard to forget that they were all built out of money made from slave trading... Liverpool was the busiest port in the UK for slave trading.

The city is obviously trying to clean itself up - there is a Tate modern there, so we enjoyed some lovely sculpture by Henry Moore and paintings by LS Lowry - my lastest fave. We ate really well too- they have fixed up the Docklands area and it's full of trendy restaurants and old shipping buildings and factories that have been converted to lofts.

Today we drove North to Crosby (just about 10km north) and went to a beach where there is an amazing art installation called 'Another Place'. It's 100 human sized sculptures embedded in the sand, all across the beach. Very spooky, especially at high tide when only the tops of some of their heads show! It was really windy, but sunny, and we enjoyed the walk.

Then we hopped back in the car and made it home in time to watch 2 pirated episodes of this season's '24', which Rob downloaded. Soooo good!

This weekend we're looking forward to entertaining a whole bunch of houseguests, and then the weekend after is Rob's Xmas Ball for work (why they have it in January, I don't understand) and then we head off to France for a week to go skiing. Here's the link to the chalet we're staying at... it looks nice. http://www.reach4thealps.com/w_brownbearlodge.html

Will definitely post again before then, and here are some pictures from Liverpool in the meantime.

On top of Liverpool Cathedral