manchester and liverpool

Last night we spent the night in Liverpool with the entire Ball State group. We took a bus there, which took about four hours and was kind of awful with so many people on the bus. (I think the capacity was 50, and we're about 48.)
Yesterday we went to Manchester, which is a few miles away from Liverpool. The two cities have a huge rivalry, and both tour guides who talked to us were pretty obviously biased against the other city. I thought that was really interesting.
I liked Liverpool better, maybe because we spent more time there. In Manchester, we did get to take a stadium tour of the Manchester United football stadium, but, since I don't really care about football (British or American), I was less than impressed.
Both cities used to be really, really poor, and both have made obvious efforts to move past that image, with a lot of "regeneration" projects everywhere. Which basically meant a lot of construction. Liverpool had a few nice new subdivisions that we drove past, which really reminded me of parts of the United States. So that was cool. Liverpool is also the birthplace of the Beatles! There were all kinds of Beatles landmarks around the city, including a Beatles museum we paid $12 to go through. I dunno if that was worth it, but it was pretty cool. I learned some stuff about the Beatles, so I guess it was cool. We also got to see Penny Lane, and took pictures with the street sign. Definitely felt like a tourist.
Last night we stayed at a youth hostel (yes, all 48 of us). It was nice because they let us explore the city a little by ourselves, so we were able to go to Matthew Street to see The Cavern, the club/bar place the Beatles played at something like 292 times. It's supposedly the most famous club in the world. So that was neat. We also went to The Cavern Nightclub, which was 70s disco-themed and really, really lame. But the Cavern Club was neat.
I think I've been on a bus about nine hours today and about the same yesterday, so I'm really glad I'm not traveling anywhere this weekend. No more transportation!!
Cheers!

Oh, I have some things I wrote down while I was on the bus, but I don't have my notebook with me so I'll post them later. They're good, I promise.