liverpool at first glance
Here's a long overdue post!
We finally made it to Liverpool just slightly over a month ago; I can hardly believe it. So much has been a whirl and a blur since then.
On December 10th, we arrived bright and early in Manchester, dazed and exhausted after barely sleeping on the seven-hour red-eye flight from Toronto. Getting a very clear view of the moon above the clouds and watching the sun rise over Ireland was wonderful though. Raspberry slept four hours at most and was a zombie going through immigration. It took her a bit but riding a travelator on the way to the train helped perk her up and she was bright-eyed and bushy-tailed while we waited for Lucas to pick Avy up. The hour-long train ride from the airport into Liverpool was a daze and there were moments where we we all nearly nodded off. Luckily, the hotel was quite literally a block from the train station, although it most certainly felt longer while hauling our bloated, overweight suitcases there. That evening, Raspberry drifted off before six p.m. and we were done by half-past eight. Beautifully, our being awake through the day staved off any jetlag, although as I like to think about it, our December 9th/10th felt like one very long day.
Our first four days were spent in a spectacular, old hotel, a place filled with plush carpets, chandeliers and what seemed like uppercrust old people. When I was busy checking into the hotel, Raspberry explored the lobby, noticed the soft carpeting under her feet and asked if she could take off her shoes. Absent-mindedly, I actually said yes before I caught myself as I saw her sitting down to remove her footwear. I jokingly told Lucas we didn't deserve this hotel, and in truth if we hadn't found a great deal online, we couldn't afford to stay in such a fancy place. We'll probably never stay in a hotel this opulent ever again. Ha!
I think in the four days we spent at the hotel, we ate out more times than we had all year. Had our room come equipped with a stove, we would have gladly made meals but rather, we had to resort to fast food for most of the days -- subs, burritos, burgers and fries, pizza. One cold, desperate afternoon we even stepped into a McDonald's because there was nothing else around and grudgingly, we bought Raspberry her first (and thankfully thus far, only) Happy Meal of chicken nuggets and fries, relinquishing the Madagascar 2 hippo toy to a child at another table because she didn't want it and she doesn't need extra toys anyway, especially Made-in-China plastic ones. The meal's only redeeming aspect was the organic milk and the fact that it transformed Raspberry from a hungry, cold, sullen, grumpy child to a more pleasant, tolerable version of herself. On our final evening at the hotel, we got a pre-cooked roast chicken, tomatoes, an avocado and cans of corn and potatoes from the grocery store and together with glasses of milk, put together some semblance of a meal that made us feel more at home. It definitely helped that the heater in the hotel room was hot enough to keep the chicken warm and the windowsill with the window open was cold enough to store milk. What a dichotomy.
Our days were largely spent walking the streets in search of a place to live. As luck would have it, Liverpool was undergoing a cold spell that week (a high of 1°C is nothing to us, coming from Canada, but we weren't used to being out in the cold for extended periods of time). The hunt for a home took us to some shady neighbourhoods, with abandoned buildings and shuttered shops. I tried to envision myself walking down those streets daily and couldn't, so it was a bit of a relief when the places we looked at were crappy (we saw mold on the walls in one and another was just kind of a dump) or the property agents cancelled on us. We called and emailed a ton of places and most refused to allow a cat or a child (mostly the former though) and quite a number deemed themselves authorities on whether two adults and a child could actually fit into a one-bedroom apartment. On the third day of our search, we finally found a gorgeous one-bedroom apartment on the edge of the city centre, a bit out of our price range but the lady Lucas spoke to seemed really nice and was willing to let us take a one bedroom place. I was beyond relieved as for a moment there, it seemed like we were going to be homeless. Unfortunately due to a bereavement, the property agent's office was closed for three days, thereby prolonging the start of the paperwork. It was unaffordable for us to extend our stay at the hotel, but fortunately someone responded to my last-minute Couchsurfing request, thereby saving us from the streets.
For a week, while we waited for the paperwork for our apartment to be processed and for our deposit and rent to be wired to the property agent, we ended up staying with Steven, a guy originally from Malaysia. He was really nice, showing us around town on the weekend and repeatedly giving us a ride into the city centre on his way into work. He has five cats too, which meant that Raspberry was in feline heaven. The presence of a kitchen and a grocery store just down the street meant that we resumed making our meals rather than eating out, which we very much appreciated for the sake of our pockets. While we were able to explore the city centre and visit museums in this time, all that waiting and being in limbo was a challenge and took its toll on all of us; it merely added to the almost five-month-long process that began when we moved out of our Hamilton apartment. I realized later that in our first week-and-a-half here, I didn't take as many pictures as I normally would have, likely because we were so caught up in the stress of finding a place to live as quickly as possible (I do regret not having more pictures from this time). It was such a weight off our shoulders when we finally moved into our apartment on the twenty-first. To quote a short story I read last week, "it's good to be home, even if home is unfamiliar."
We've now been in our apartment, our home for almost three-and-a-half weeks. Initially, it felt foreign, to be able to say things like, "let's go home now." For the previous five months, both Lucas and I actively avoided using the word "home," since we didn't actually have our own home. To be able to say it once again requires practice and the positive reinforcement of feeling all warm and fuzzy when I say it out loud. I can't wait until I don't have to consciously think about it when I use the word.
Our past few weeks have been a glorious wash of museum visits. We live within a forty minute walk (almost two miles) of most museums and because it's been the holidays, the museums have all had some kind of craft activity going on just about every single day (Raspberry is really into making art and doing crafts right now -- our apartment has been engulfed in a mass of paper scraps, tape, glue and pencils). The walk there and back was initially quite daunting for Raspberry, who hasn't walked long distances in five months, but I think she's getting used to it, although some days she prefers a day in so she doesn't have to walk. I love the fact that there are so many museums (and that they're all free) and there's always something to do -- this is what we were severely lacking living in Hamilton and what I was longing for. Raspberry needs a bit of time to get used to the museums -- her first visit to any of them involved a lot of excited running around from one exhibit to another. I think the wealth of information was overwhelming, and I'd actually forgotten from previous experience that her upper limit for spending time at a museum is about two hours. This week, we're going to try taking our time to explore one small area of a museum at a time in the hopes that she'll be able to better focus.
The oft-asked question is, expectedly, how Liverpool is. Mostly, I'm unsure of what to say because I haven't thought deeply about it, so I settle in the easiest, least provocative answer, that it's good. And it has been good. We've wrenched ourselves out of our monotonous existence, out of our comfort zone and have begun building ourselves the kind lives we've been wanting for a while. I can't expect immediate perfection but sometimes I do wish for it, because hey, it's always nice when things are perfect. We're working on making things better and that of course comes with time. I'm actually quite looking forward to us easing into a new routine, with Lucas going to school and doing his thing, Raspberry and I getting more into unschooling, and as we teach Raspberry to be more independent, I'll hopefully be able to able to start working on my own art again. Not to be cliche, but I really do think it's going to be fun.