UK 2013 - day 10: Liverpool and Wigan

Monday, July 29, 2013

We slept in after going to bed at 3 am.
I don't think sleeping in on vacation is a good idea. Next year there will be none of that.
We had very little time to walk around Wigan.
At breakfast, we talked for a long time with Lu, then went for a walk Downtown Wigan. We visited their parish church, which has a very unique history, including a pagan altar left in the church wall. We took a picture at their pretend beach - right downtown, and ate at a pie shop.
We had to hurry to get to Liverpool to meet Dean's friend at the scheduled time.

He took us for a Beatles tour, including the place where the Quarrymen recorded their first CD, John's school, and we got to walk around Penny Lane.

At the L7 Turkish Market, Dean bought shaving products and I bought lokum - Turkish delight. Disgusting. Don't buy grocery store lokum. Buy the fresh stuff. So much better.

Then Stephen took us to eat at Jimmy's an Indian place where we had chicken and lamb kebabs.

 oh he also showed us this very tiny house. The tiniest house in England.



Back at Lu's, we chatted some more and she taught me about page 3 of the paper I had bought - The Sun.
Yeah ... Hubby won't be allowed to read that page ... ever.
Out to dinner at a chippy shop, we stopped at Asda for an aux cable and ended up buying £15 worth of stuff. Asda or Walmart is a dangerous place that favors impulse buying.

The chippy place is a take-away. We brought the food home, and ate and chatted till almost 1 ... While she provided me with plenty of liqueur samples ... Someone here is trying to get me drunk. I drew the line when she brought out something with 80% alcohol. Yeah ... no. I need to be alive tomorrow.

Today's expenses
wigan car park (grand arcade) - £2.50(cash)
b&m - £1.98 (cash)
L7 Village Market - £11.97(cash)
asda - £15.19(cash)
Pound Bakery - £3.00(cash)
EE - £3.00(cash)

Now let's talk about this little phone card called Orange. Don't buy it if you are a tourist to the UK. They want you to register a British post code. if you don't have one, they assign you the store'spost code. But then you can't register a credit card. Then credit card has to be registered with the same post code the phone has been.
There is also the need to wait 24 hours after you register the phone to receive a number.
When you try to register your account online they want the post code... And again, you can't register the credit card. So we couldn't put credit in the phone until we found a store in London. Until that time we could make no phone calls, nor receive them.
Oh! After you receive the number, you have to call and register your calling package. Yes, you need to register a calling package. Even though when we bought the card at ASDA, we asked form the Camel package and the girl brought us a card with a camel on the cover, you have to call and register the package. Camel gives you 120 minutes of international talk if you top off with £15.00.
Since we didn't register the package, Dean called his mom for 12 minutes, and all our £15.00 were gone.
Dean yelled at them over the phone. They refused to give us back our credit. He said we were throwing the card away, but then we had to put it back in to make an emergency phone call, and there was an apology message and they registered us with the camel package .
We ended up sticking with it. But just to save us the trouble of having to buy another number.
FIRST AND LAST TIME. NEVER AGAIN.