Day One in Liverpool

Our usual Day One procedure when we visit a city in England is to take one of the Hop-on Hop-off bus tours. It's a good way to work through the first painful hours of jet lag and get an idea of what you really want to see and do in the days that follow. You get a sense of direction locked in and some bits of useful information. From the top of the bus, you also get some intriguing peeks inside first (second in US) floor windows and a closer look at the little architectural bits above the ground floor.

Lovely pigeons here in Liverpool

Liverpool has the second largest amount of listed buildings in England, after London. There are political and social reasons for this which I hope to go into later. I would have found this surprising BEFORE we took the tour. Afterwards it was far from surprising.  I must have looked like a bobble-head doll as my head turned left to right and then up and down in amazement at the wealth of old brick buildings and their fanciful trim. So many pictures for my Flickr groups...doors, windows Victorian ornament. I hope I find the energy to revisit some of these when I am not whizzing by on a bus - thank goodness for stop lights. Someone, at some point, must have taken the time to calculate how many millions of bricks were brought into Liverpool to create this rust-toned cityscape. I'll try to find out.

After going full circle, we hopped off at the Central Library. What an astounding place! It's a magical mash-up of stone and neon, classical and modern, with treasures everywhere. I can't wait to show it to my soon-to-be visiting cousin, a retired librarian.

Just a teaser photo for now

Our plan to utilize several more stops bogged down in total exhaustion, so we headed back to the hotel and a brief rest. Well, it was a brief rest for Amy and Arne but I was down for the night. They went on to Castle St Townhouse, a great cocktail bar where they made some new friends followed by a stop at the Thomas Rigby Pub (evidently no relation to eleanor).