Friday, May 27, 2005

Pictures Tell a Thousand Words

As long time readers will know, this blog (being "The Gospel According To Rhys", not the website) used to be exlusively a photoblog for "The Art of Rhysisms" (my other blog). However, since I made this my main blog, the photoblog aspect has been lost. Until now. Now it's the time to ressurect that, as I went to the Liverpool's victory parade at Lime Street, just to see what all the fuss was about.

What I saw was incredible, and really quite sombering in a wierd way. Approximately 300,000 people descended to Lime Street, which was roughly the same as who died in the tsunami. Which, was in the back of my mind for a little of the celebrations.

I started off going through Lime Street Station, the hub for international travel, which was unusually packed:-

As packed as that was, it didn't hit me until I saw people struggling to get any sort of vantage point:-

They weren't the only ones who thought higher was better. Some 15 year old girl, who was very, very short (mockingly short, if you will). She needed a little extra lift, which I was happy to oblige, provided she snapped a few pictures:-

Notice in the last picture, that there is a bus there. Apparently at around 5pm, there was a rush of people, so much so that they engulfed a whole bus.

Unfortunately, at around 8:30, we got word that the coach was approximately 2 hours behind schedule. I really couldn't be arsed waiting in increasingly cold weather (I wore shorts and t-shirts), so I got the 15 year old girl to dismount me (which sounds so wrong), headed to St. John's Square, where I took two more photos, one of the parade on the big screen:-

All in all, it was an experience. I returned back home to Colwyn Bay, and everybody I've spoken to - no matter who you supported - was really jealous.

That's the good thing about football. No matter who you support (as a Man United fan, I can say this), it has united the country. We hear the bad side about the beautiful game so many times, and often I lose faith in it. But yesterday, there were 300,000 people in the city centre, and not a single troublemaker.

Surely that's the beautiful side of the beautiful game....