2006 Beatle Week and the Mathew Street Festival in Liverpool

The International Inn is a clean, socially-conscious hostel in Liverpool, a comfortable-enough walk from the city centre. Around the corner is its sister establishment, the International Inn serviced apartments. Beds at the hostel are GBP15 per night in the dorm and the ensuite twin room is GBP36 per night.

Service at the hostel was excellent; we made our booking from abroad by telephone, and the staff were very helpful both with our booking as well as with our questions regarding tours and things to do around Liverpool. We spent our first night in a dorm that slept eight. The bedrooms and linen were clean, although the lockers were a little small.
This was the first hostel we had ever stayed at, and we experienced the inconvenience of trying to get ready for bed as quietly as possible, hoping not to disturb our sleeping roommates. The second night we moved to a twin room.

The common eating area was as expected, less sparkling, with the number of people who went in and out to eat there. The washing machine wasn't working when we were there. One of the nice conveniences was that the hostel was next door to a socially-conscious coffee shop (fair trade coffee only) that had cheap Internet access.

We were, on the whole, quite pleased with our stay at International Inn.

Our dinner place of choice in Liverpool was a little Chinese restaurant on Bold Street called "Tea House." The food was cheap by British standards (which isn't saying much), but we were pleasantly surprised by the size of the rice portions - just like eating in a restaurant back home in the Philippines! (My fellow-Asians will understand how difficult it is to go without rice after a few days!)

The International Beatle Week is an annual Beatles festival that began in Liverpool (where else?) in 1981. (See www.cavern-liverpool.co.uk/beatleweek/index.htm.) We timed our trip to Liverpool such that we would arrive on Day 3 of the festival, the day of the Beatle Convention at the Adelphi Hotel.

We were flying into Heathrow that day and from the airport, it was a coach ride to London Victoria, and then another coach ride to Liverpool. The tire burst on our five-hour trip to Liverpool, so we lost an hour waiting for a back-up coach to arrive.

We arrived at Liverpool at around 7pm, checked into our hostel (the International Inn - a clean, socially-conscious hostel), exchanged pleasantries with one of our roommates, and then headed right out for a yummy dinner, and then to catch the last few hours of the Beatles Convention. Because we arrived so late, each of us was charged only five quid to enter the convention hall, rather than the usual 15 GBP.

Somehow I had gotten it into my head that the Beatle Convention would be crowded with rowdy drunk youngsters, but when we arrived at the Adelphi Hotel, we found that we were among the youngest there! Most of the convention visitors were our parents' age! Many of them were in Beatles T-shirts, some were sporting hippie hair-do's; a group of four women in their late fifties were in costume, with beehive hairdo's, mini-dresses, and boots. There where many mothers with their adult daughters, fathers with their adult sons, and a few who had both their children and grandchildren with them as well!

In the Convention area, we browsed through tables and tables of Beatles memorabilia - old records, newspaper clippings, magazines, books, pins, shirts, Sgt. Pepper costumes, artwork, photographs.... extremely cool.

In one room, a video screen had been set up to show old video footage of the Beatles. Beatles cover bands performed simultaneously in two rooms: the scheduled performers on the main stage, and an "open mic" on a smaller stage a few rooms away.

We got a kick out of watching the bands, as well as the audience! When one of the cover bands started playing "As My Guitar Gently Weeps" two married couples in front of us - probably in their forties or fifties - started dancing seductively, while another middle-aged couple started making out passionately like teenagers (this was quite cool for awhile, but when there were still at it four songs later, it began to get a little icky). A group of bald men beside us sang along loudly to "Norwegian Wood" raising and waving their beer glasses to the beat of the song.

We headed back to the hostel at around 11pm. 

The Beatle Festival takes place every year in August, but the city fills up very quickly so book early. There are options for all budgets: you can buy complete hotel packages from Cavern City Tours (+44 151 236 9091), or find your own accommodation and buy tickets to individual events.

The Mathew Street Music Festival overlaps with the International Beatle Week, and after our fantastic evening at the Beatle Convention, we spent our second day in Liverpool enjoying Europe's largest annual street music festival.

We picked up a brochure from our hostel's reception area. It was the last day of the three-day festival, and the line-up of the bands looked exciting. Four of the five stages, on Liverpool streets closed to traffic, were going to be showcasing tribute bands the entire day, and we were able to watch clones of Kiss, U2, a bit of Madonna, a bit of Coldplay, and a bit of the Rolling Stones. We went back to the hostel for a short rest before heading back out for the last few hours of the festival. By the time we got to the festival venue, hundreds and hundreds of more people had arrived, and the mood had changed into an even more festive one, as groups of friends were happily celebrating in their by-now-quite-inebriated states. It was a wonderful, crazy, happy street party. We watched an up-and-coming Liverpool band (my husband: "I think these people are going to be famous"), and then a fantastic way to end our experience of the festival ... a QUEEN tribute band! Everyone - young and old, teenagers, and grandparents - were singing along to the Queen songs, waving their arms in the air (me: "You'd think it were really Freddie Mercury himself!").

We headed to dinner debating the merits of the Beatles, Queen, and U2 before dinner and then walked back to the hostel to sleep.

The Mathew Street Music Festival is held on various venues in Liverpool every summer. Accommodation is hard to come by during the week so book early.

We weren't originally intending to go to the Beatles Story Museum on our last day in Liverpool. However, we were told in the morning that the Beatles tour we had wanted to go on was not pushing through, so we had to go into town to join a different bus tour at 11:40am. We checked out of the hostel, put our luggage in the hostel's luggage storage, and then headed into town.

We arrived at the Tourist Centre at 11, but were told that the 11:40am slot was already fully booked! We debated for awhile about whether we should go on the next tour, which would end at 4:40pm. Our coach back to London was scheduled to leave at 5:30pm, so we would have less than an hour after the tour to get to the coach station. We figured it could work if we already had our luggage with us, because then we could go straight to the coach station after the tour.

With that plan in mind, we booked the 2:40pm bus tour, had lunch, walked all the way back to our hostel, picked up our luggage, lugged it all the way back to the Tourist Centre, and waited.

2:20 came, then 2:30, then 2:40... and there was still no bus. We were informed that the bus was stuck in traffic because an accident had taken place on one of Liverpool's main roads. My husband and I looked at each other helplessly. 2:45pm came and went, and the bus still hadn't arrived. One of the staff members told us the bus was just a few minutes away, but we realized that if we took the tour, we might miss our coach trip back to London. Reluctantly, we asked for a refund.

Disheartened, the two of us left the Tourist Centre with all our luggage, unsure of what to do next. Finally, we decided to go to the Beatles Story Museum up at Albert Dock. We painstakingly made our way to Albert Dock (about 30 minutes on foot with our luggage), and bought our tickets. Fortunately, we were allowed to leave our luggage at the reception.

The Beatles Story Museum was a very nice chronological telling of the Beatles Story from the Beatles' childhood to how the Beatles first began in Liverpool, to how Beatlemania took over the world, to all the recordings they made, to the break-up, to their solo careers, and then finally, to John's and George's deaths.

It was quite emotional, especially the tribute room to John, and we left the museum feeling sad but also overwhelmed by how great the Beatles really were. We headed to the coach station then to London.

The Beatles Story museum (www.beatlesstory.com) is a quick way to get your Beatles fill if you don't have a lot of time in Liverpool. It is open everyday from 10am to 6pm. Admission is GBP 9.99 for adults and includes an audio commentary.