York (Spring Break Part I)

So for the next few posts I am going to try and recap my spring break adventures. During the past two weeks I used my ipod to write a couple blogs, but since I didn't have internet access I couldn't post them. But, as the events they pertain to come up, I will publish them (unaltered). Over the next few days keep your eyes out for lots of updates on the past few weeks. Let's start:

We left three Fridays ago as an entire group and took the three-hour train ride to York. We were staying in a hostel, girls in one room guys in another. There are eight girls on our trip, and our room only had one toilet and shower. Made for some interesting bathroom scheduling. Not much happened Friday night other than eating dinner and trying to sleep in the insanely unstable bunk beds. Saturday morning Sammi and I went out early to try and explore York. York is a neat place because it still has its Medieval Walls, so the city is kind of separated into the old, medieval town and the newer industrial city that surrounds it. We were lucky enough to stay inside the walls. Our exploring didn't last too long, as we had to meet up with the rest of the group and Prof. Frank to look at a medieval church. The church was really neat, and you could see the changes that had been made during the Reformation, as well as the parts that had been added to over the years. Pictures will be coming soon, I promise.

After that we got to go to the HUGE cathedral, York Minster (it looked like a sister cathedral to West Minster in London.) Our guide was an amazing former engineer, who had been retired for a few years and decided to volunteer as a guide in the cathedral to keep active. His knowledge of the architecture of the place was outstanding, and I'm very glad he was our guide. Turns out that when they were building the cathedral (made of limestone) they still wanted people to have a place to worship, so the cathedral was build over and around the existing wooden church. This is why the "lobby" area of the cathedral is so huge, it had to accommodate the wooden church inside of it. The wooden church was sitting on top of the old Roman city that existed before York. The Roman city was made entirely of wood. As you can bet, it isn't a good idea to build a huge limestone structure on top of an area of rotting wood. Our guide explained that the pressure coming from the huge tower of the cathedral was not properly supported, so all of the arches in the church are leaning one way or another. Check out the pictures to see the effect, but it was amazing, and none of us would have even thought about it if our guide didn't point it out.

After seeing the cathedral, we had free time. Sammi and I decided we would explore the walls of York and try to find Jewbury, the place where all of the Jews lived, and were later expelled from. Climbing on the walls was really neat, especially since most of them still exist. We made it to Jewbury, but wouldn't have known unless Sammi fortuitously looked down as we were walking. All that marked the area was a Star of David on the ground. It was super depressing.

We then made our way back to the center of the old town and climbed up to the remains of York Castle. There isn't much left, but from it we got a pretty decent panoramic view of York, including views of the river. I've nicknamed this river the River Brown, for obvious reasons.

Then it was time for a big group dinner at an Indian restaurant, where they didn't understand that each person at the table needed a glass to drink from. Not sure what all of that was about, but it took till halfway through the meal for everyone to have a glass. Other than that the food was good. We went to a play after dinner about Sherlock Holmes. It was kind of interesting, but slightly boring, so I was more than happy to head back to the hostel for some sleep. We were leaving early the next morning to take the train to London. Stay tuned for a recap of London adventures!