Freshly Minted: A Day in York

(Luke again...)
Yesterday Allison and I had a day trip down to York (about an hour-long train ride), keeping with our "let's see England for cheap" plan that we started this semester. So, we got ourselves down to the train station by 9:15, and boarded our train south. The day started mostly cloudy and it rained on us lightly on our way to the station, keeping in line with the forecast of 'showers'. We expected the worst. But how wrong our expectations were! In fact, York became our new favorite city in England. And it didn't rain on us once--in fact the sun came out. Now, combining York with the Yorkshire Dales, Yorkshire is definitely our favorite and most-recommended region in England. And I was left kicking myself...I must have chosen the wrong York (PA) to go to for college all those years ago...if only I had known the better York lay on the other side of the Atlantic!

After arriving at York and leaving the train station, we were met by a large and impressive-looking wall, which we found out spanned a majority of city perimeter. We walked along the wall, and over a river, arriving in a very old and beautiful-looking part of the city. We wandered around for several minutes, getting oriented. We had several historic sites picked out to see that day, and the first we ended up at was the Jorvik Viking Centre. York had been a primary place of habitation by the Vikings and an archaeological excavation years ago had unearthed the site of Viking 'Jorvik'. The site is now a museum and Disney-type Viking theme ride. It was, in a word, incredible. In a few more words, it was definitely worth the 11 pounds total we paid to get in. The first section of the site was the museum, which is naturally underground, being a 1300-year old archaeological site. From there, you were brought to the Viking theme ride, in which you sat in a 'pod' and were mechanically transported around a reconstructed Viking village, where old crafts were reconstructed and lots of Old Norse was spoken by the somewhat creepy looking mechanized life-sized dolls. The ride took about 10 minutes and was very entertaining, but eventually came to an end. The next section of the site was a continuation of the museum, where Viking artifacts and skeletons were displayed (the skeletons displaying war wounds and such).

After a fun morning at the Viking Centre, we had a quick lunch stop on a bench. The city is so very pleasant and feels much less big and commercial than Newcastle, so it was nice to just walk around its streets and discover what it had to offer. Following lunch, we made our way to Clifford's Tower, an English Heritage-owned motte and bailey castle, with a commanding view of York. There wasn't much to the castle but the view was definitely worth the trip, and being English Heritage members we got in free anyway! At Clifford Tower were coupons to get half-off into the "York Dungeon" (York apparently is the most haunted city in England and prides itself on this fact, much like Salem is in the US). Getting to the Dungeon, we discerned that it looked a bit too corny and touristy for us, so we didn't go in. Plus the long line outside made it totally not worth it.

From there, we wandered around looking for the York Brewery, but it was apparently invisible (we discovered later that really the signs were just wacky, and it was on the other side of the river). We did end up in a section of town housing many quaint and cozy looking tea rooms and cafes (unlike some cities where most tea and coffee places are just national or international chains), so we decided to pop into one for a drink and snack. We sampled local tea and local beer (Yorkshire is known for some of the best English breweries), before heading back out on the town. We made our way to another historic site we were planning on seeing, the Medieval Merchant Adventurer's Hall, but found it was more expensive than we had been led to believe by our guidebook, so we scrapped that. But it was ok, because we then just meandered around the town, looking into little shops, going into others. Eventually, we ended up at the York Minster, a huge cathedral much resembling Der Dom in Cologne in architecture and size. However, we also avoided going into that one due to admission charges (Der Dom in Cologne and Durham Cathedral do NOT charge admission, but apparently the Minster in York does...). So we snapped some pictures and headed down another side street. After several minutes we came upon another section of York's medieval walls and so we decided to take a stroll along them. They are accessible to the public and apparently walking them is a major highlight of visiting York. It was a pretty little walk, but we couldn't go far as we had a train to catch back to Newcastle. We were able to walk back to the station via the walls for most of the way, however, which was nice. By this point the sun had finally come out and some beautiful photos were taken. Sitting in the train station, waiting for our train, we both agreed that York was our favorite English city and Yorkshire our favorite region and we heartily recommend them to anyone coming to this island!

The Streets of York..