I woke up today around 7:30 a.m. this morning. I took a shower and then had some breakfast. While walking to breakfast it was pouring outside.  So my day as you can see did not start as I wanted.  After eating breakfast I met up with the rest of my classmates and we headed on up to the Maritime Museum to start our day.  We met up with this man  Eric in the heart of Liverpool’s Albert Dock and we began our tour of  the city. The tour began in front of the Maritime Museum.  As we started the tour my expectations grew and grew. 

During the tour it seemed like the weather was getting worse.  I mean just standing there taking in so much new information, was so exciting. Being cold was not so exciting.  In the beginning we learned about the meaning of the word “ethnicity” which comes from the root word “ethnic” and means “pagan.” Then, we learned about Liverpool and the fact that it is multi-racial.  We talked about the amount of Black people compared to the amount of Whites. After all of that we took a walk to try and find some shelter since the rain was horrendous. We ended up going to sit inside a museum.  There he began telling us about his history and where he and his family came from.  We learned that he was born in England, but not his parents.  His mother was a white Russian woman who was Jewish. Also, his father was from  Barbados.  With all of that information the point that he was trying to make was that you can not tell a persons background just by looking at his or her skin color.  For example, just because someone looks White does not mean that they can not have a Black parent. 

After that then we left and started to take a walk around Liverpool.  We started by the Merseyside Maritime Museum at the Albert Docks  During our walk we learned that at the beginning of some days during transatlantic slave trade,  slave catchers in west Africa would take  Africans from different communities to be sold in  places like Barbados, Jamaica, or Brazil. slaves  .Usually, they would not just kidnap slaves from the same area.  The reason was that different areas had different languages.  In this way they would not be able to plot and escape because they would not understand each others language.  In the midst of a sale of a slave, the slave owner would get more money for a female than a male just because she is able to reproduce more slaves.  When slaves were out aboard the slave ship, they would be packed like sardines.  Mind you, they had no clothes and no toilet.  Towards the middle of the tour Mr. Eric started to correlate slavery in relationship to Liverpool.  Basically what I got from his walking tour was that Liverpool would not be as big a city as it is now if it was not for slavery.  At the end of the tour we learned that slavery was started because of  economics and ended over changing economic factors. Overall  I think that he was very knowledgeable. Like I always say everyday, you learn a little bit more than you learned yesterday.
 

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