Feb 6th
Be thankful for what
you have before it’s too late,
even for small things.
Firstly, I did my first load of wash here. The washer in our kitchen is terrible. It's supposed to be a dryer as well, but I couldn't get it to work. But worse still, it pretty much damaged all the clothes I put in it. I have to throw one of my shirts away--that's how harshly the machine treated my clothes.
Ok, York! Our York trip was a wonderful one! It began around 11AM on Friday. We, Leah, Roxanne, and I, left a rainy Leeds that was windy enough to literally sweep us off our feet! We walked the half-hour path through the city center to the Leeds Coach Station. Our coach was only about 1 hour, a very short ride compared to when we took the coach to London (~4 1/2 hours...not so pleasant on a cold bus). York was gorgeous! The sky was sunny, there were people everyone, and we were ready to explore.
We walked through the main part of the city (all the way up to Minster, a cathedral), and took a route that was a bit out of our way to the hostel. We passed doll shops, cafes, the school that Guy Fawkes went to, etc. It was lovely! Throughout this city are ruins of the walls that used to guard it. Buildings are built around or through them. It was a great mixture of old and new architecture.
After we got to the hostel (which was great, by the way! Very cute and we had a room all to ourselves!), we took the shorter route back to the city by walking along the waterfront path. Our first stop was the Yorkshire Museum. Large ruins surrounded the grounds of the museum. They are so picturesque that it is almost unbelievable! The next site we visited was the absolutely lovely Minster. We explored the Minster Museum, located under the cathedral (no pictures allowed). To see a virtual tour of Minster, click here. After emerging from the underground museum, we toured Minster itself.
Minster is a BEAUTIFUL building and I would highly recommend anyone visiting the UK to see it. It has very high walls decorated top to bottom. There are many sections of the cathedral. We first walked through the main entrance hallway, then circled the outer halls where we saw plenty of statues, tombs, paintings, etc. In between the outer circular halls is an inner "room" (no ceiling) where the choir sang. On this first day, because the choir was in session, we weren't allowed to go in there. We then walked around the main section of the cathedral where the pews and chairs were set up. That was the longest section of the cathedral. People came and sat in the chairs and said a prayer or two. It was very quiet and you could tell that even though there were a lot of tourists there, everyone was being respectful. We wanted to go to the tower next, but since it was quite windy in York (as it had been in Leeds that same day), they had closed it. We determined, though, to go back the next day and see if it was open.
After we left the cathedral, we wandered down a few streets to see if shops were open, but seeing as it was about 5:00PM, almost everything was closed. However, we did find a second-hand book store, so we stopped in there for a little while. When we reemerged, we were hungry. I'm not sure why this is, but everything closes SUPER early here. It was hard to even find a place to eat dinner, which is what we set out to do next. We ended up at Pizza Express. This sounds like a place where you could get cheap pizza fast, but this isn't the case. We've seen Pizza Expresses everywhere. Every single time we are shocked at the prices because we continually hope that it'll be cheaper depending on the area you're in. Not true. When we entered, a waiter sat us down at a table. I scanned the menu for a while and finally ended up going with the cheapest pizza on it: Pizza Margherita, aka plain cheese for £6.95 (~$11). It was delicious, but costly. After this, we set out to find ice cream. There was this semi-shady candy store where we spied ice cream through the window, so we stopped there. I got a dish of Irish cream marble or something like that. It was the oddest tasting ice cream I've ever had, but still good. It was much sweeter and grainier than I had expected.
We had a bit of time to waste before our ghost walk tour began, so we found a Costa, going in right before they closed, got tea and sat outside on a bench to people-watch for a while. The city is quite interesting at night. Mostly there seemed to be tourists out at this time, a few cyclists and joggers, and a some already drunk people. When it was quarter of 7, we gathered around a tree in front of Minster where the tour was supposed to meet. We were the first ones there, but soon after a large group of people joined us. To begin with, there were probably about 20 of us. After the tour started, about 20 more people joined us. It was nuts! It kind of annoyed the tour guide since it meant that the new people hadn't payed yet, but he made several jokes about it as the tour went along to give the joiners a heads-up that he would collect from them after. The guide was amazing! He was very quick witted, had a joke for everything, even when drunk teens began annoying us half way through the tour in the Bedern part of the city by yelling "I'm a ghost. Oooooooo!" The tour was insightful and very fun. It wasn't very scary, but there was one part (again in the Bedern section (a lower class neighborhood)) where he was telling us a story about how these orphans were murdered and "murdered" was the very last word in his sentence and everyone had been listening in attentively and he screamed it, causing pretty much everyone to jump. It was great. The tour also took us down Shambles Street. It's supposed to be a very haunted street because it lies between 2 cemeteries. He had stories to go with it, but I can't fully remember them. We determined also to return to Shambles in the morning when the shops would reopen. After the tour ended, we went back to the hostel and slept.
This church is across the street from Minster (seen in the right corner). It tends to be easily overlooked.
Minster!! How beautiful. The tree here is the one we waited by for the ghost tour.
An example of advertisement of the type of ghost walk we did. This one isn't the one we went with, but they cover the same things pretty much.
Neat tracks on the walk to the hostel.
Walking back to the city center, we took the river path.
Beautiful.
More river path and old wall ruins.
Ruins.
Yorkshire Museum.
Ruins on the Yorkshire Museum grounds.
Ruins. This reminds of of Rivendell.
Beautiful. It also smelled lovely!
More ruins.
Inside Minster.
Minster.
A great sign at the ice cream place. "Hippies use backdoor."
Me in my happy place.
Minster at night! Creepy! We were waiting for the tour to begin.
Our ghost walk tour guide. Hat, cane, jacket, gloves and all.The next day we found breakfast and headed back down to Minster. We stopped first in the gift shop and bought little nicknacks. I collect magnets from wherever I go, so I bought my York magnet here. We then headed back to the main part of the cathedral and bought tickets to go up into the tour. It was a very painful journey up! Soooo many winding stairs! The view from the top was very nice though.
When we had finished with the tower, we found a cute pasty restaurant and ate lunch there. I had a pork and apple pasty and delicious strawberry-raspberry water. With our bellies full, we set out again and went to a couple shops on Shambles St. Shambles, apart from being known as a haunted street, is also a very old street where the buildings sort of tumble over into each other. When you look at the picture below, you'll see what I mean. When we were finished, we walked part of the wall ruins (very cool!), visited Cliffords Tower, and then it was time to go home. Overall, York was amazing and we will be going back soon to ride the Hogwarts Express. I mean this quite literally!
Minster. Lovely!
View from the top of the tower.
Walking the wall ruins.
Shambles St.
Cliffords Tower.
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