Manchester - Liverpool
Autor: Wally | Publicado: 2010-07-18T19:44:00-07:00

School vacations!!! We finally started our mochilão-part one. It was a crazy trip: Porto » London » Manchester » Liverpool » London » Paris » Versailles » Paris (Merry Christmas!!!) » London » Oxford » London (Happy New Year!!!) » Glasgow » Edinburgh » Dublin » London » Porto.
We were very excited because we had been planning all stuff for months...hostel reservations, couchsurfing, lots of budgets, tickets of airplanes, buses, trains...

So let's get it started...we left Portugal on December 17th by Raynair airplane. We arrived in London Stansted Airport at about 11:50pm.  It's was crowded!

Man, it was so hard to understand British English. I know it's a beautiful accent, but when you need it to survive it's not that beaty...an officer put us in the wrong immigration queue...wasting of time that was enough to miss the shuttle that we reserved before....wasting of money! we even had to hear a spanish guy ridiculing us: "solamente para los ciudadanos europeos".

That's ok. Living and learning: when you book a shuttle make sure you'll have enough time to take it...

So we went to the right immigration queue with all documentation to enter in the UK. The interwiew was easy because we had a portuguese resident card. Basic questions they asked: where were you? what were you doing there? where are you going to? what are you going to do there? do you have money?

We had a british friend who gave us his address, just in case...

After having our passports stamped we were officially in London, baby! We bought other suttle tickets to London downtown, where we were going to take another bus (Megabus-they have great prices!) at Victoria Couch Station in the morning to Manchester. What a cold!

The sensation of being in UK was amazing. In fact, it was my personal dream to go there. Listening British English is awsome!

Ok...we took the bus to Manchester. By the way, we were going to stay in a couchsurfer house, but we still hadn't the address because of some communication problems. They were solved by the end of the day and  we met our host (Sam) and his friends at night and we prepared our speciality: chicken stroganoff. They loved it! Sam was really nice and funny and so were his friends.

Next day (2009/12/19) we saw our first international soccer game!!! Simply amazing! Manchester City vs Sunderland. We were City supportes and even bought the team muffler. It was an exciting soccer game with City's victory by 4 goals against 3 from Sunderland.

Then we came back Sam's house, ate some pizzas and played some games with the guys.

Next morning we departed from Manchester to Liverpool by train. We left some chocolates and a card thanking Sam for his hospitality.
We arrived in Liverpool in the afternoon and spent only one nigth there. It was a rainy day and a cold night. We cooked pasta to our host, Mr Lewis. He's from Zimbabue, I think and he loves american black music. Ah, one detail: he hadn't a shower =)....whatever, it was cold and nobody wanted to take a shower, I guess..haha
Beautiful city where Beatles started! There we found out that Abbey Road is in London, not in Liverpool.

Next day we came back to London where we took a bus-ship-bus to Paris!




We, Sam(Checkered t-shirt) and his friends

Liverpool downtown


 The Cavern Pub was built in 1994 in front of the Cavern Club where, between 1957 and 1973, most of the all-time greats of rock (Beatles, of course), pop, soul,  and jazz played.

Cavern Pub inside, by Gushy and Hirooka


Liverpool Chinatown