Hey! Today was our first full day in Liverpool. From my post last night, you can gather that we arrived safely to our new quarters for the next few days. I do have access to Wifi, thank goodness! We started the morning by listening to a lecture and what better place to hear a lecture than the University of Liverpool. He really helped put into context our time in Liverpool by giving us a rough overview of the history of the city. It was really interesting and definitely informative. Most of us then stopped at Pret (our new nickname for Pret a Manger) which has become a staple in our lives while we have been here. We grabbed some lunch to go and ate it on the ferry ride we took on the Mersey River. 

After eating some lunch and learning a few new facts about Liverpool and the Mersey, we debarked the boat and went over to a museum where we had free time for about 20 minutes before our next tour. Dr. Bell and a few of my classmates went to the Titanic exhibit. I learned that the Titanic was actually built in Liverpool and many of the staff and crew of the ship were Liverpudlians. It was a really sad exhibit, but we made it a little happier by dressing up as members of the crew. Dr. Bell will never miss a dress up opportunity! When it was time to meet up for the tour, we were introduced to two funny characters named Ben and Danny who gave us a tour of the old dock which was recently excavated and preserved. It was fascinating to learn about the dock and the history of docks in Liverpool. It was also our first experience with the Liverpudlian accent, which is incredibly hard to understand. It is sort of a mix of Irish and Scottish, with a bit of English. 

Our last activity for the day was visiting the Museum of Liverpool. We were all assigned a different room in the museum and were charged with the task of finding something that interested us and present it to the class. I picked a picture of women working on sewing the interior of Ford cars. They decided to strike because they were not receiving equal pay to men and therefore were influential to the Women's Movement. Other people picked things related to the Beatles or the dance scene, locomotives, and class differences. Lauren talked about these really weird things here called superlambananas, which sort of remind me of the painted crabs in Baltimore. It has the body of a lamb and the tail of a banana. It's really bizarre. The hostel has been a little different than the last one we stayed in, including the fact that we are staying in rooms of 6 girls. It gets a little chaotic, especially with our suitcases. We dropped another two people today from illness, but they are feeling much better now. The three from yesterday have pretty much been back to normal today. We are praying that this little stint of sickness is over and we are heading out on our coldest activity tomorrow, an outside tour of Liverpool. We have found Liverpool to be much chillier than either Bristol or London, probably due to the fact that it is more north. 

Tonight most of us are going to dinner together to an Italian place. I think we are banking on a low key night since some of us have a lot of work to do tonight and we are all pretty tired from traveling and having such a busy day. Missing you all tons and can't wait to get back and tell you all of my stories! Love you!!!