York

Although I was still really tired from my long flights the day before, Daniel and I decided to make our first day trip on Saturday. We used our Britrail passes to get on a train to York. It was only about a 45 minute train ride from Leeds.

We had a little trouble getting a map when we first go there. We found a machine to buy city maps for 1 pound but it was empty. After some looking around we found another one that was also empty. We were 2 pounds down and still didn't have a map. Luckily, as we were leaving the station we saw someone refilling one of the machines and when we told him what happened he gave us a map and refunded all our money!

I just love walking around these older cities. Each and every building has so much character. It's also really interesting to see really old buildings right next to more modern buildings.

The first thing we noticed when we left the train station was that the city centre is surrounded by a wall. It's gone in some places but it's actually in pretty good condition for how old it is.

We were actually able to walk along the wall at some spots.

One of the first views of the city as a whole.

You can see the two towers of the York Minster in the background.

Walking along the street we came to a river.

The River Ouse runs through the city. Later in the day we took a walking tour and we learned that it used to be about three times as wide and much shallower but all the building along the river gradually caused it to be like it is today. Also, they used to have a council that was in charge of making sure the river stayed clean but they got caught peeing in it lol.

We came to this large garden that had the remnants of St. Mary's Abbey. It was torn down by Henry VIII. I briefly read a sign about it but I think he had a lot of religious buildings torn down, mainly because he was greedy and wanted their money but also because of religious changes.

Near the entrance to the abbey.

You can barely see that there are cut outs of crosses built into the wall.

One of the walls off the abbey.

This is where the monks would spend their time in worship.

We continued farther into town and finally came to the York Minster. We could see the towers from far away so I was excited to see it up close.

This building was started in the mid 1200s but there are records of a church being on this site since the 600s. It was destroyed and torn down many times until the 1200s when they started building it in the Gothic style. We were told by our walking tour guide that we could get in for free if we went in after 5 but that turned out to be true only if we attended the service.

After lunch we decided to try out one of the walking tours. They had two tours going on at the same time. One was called Secret York that was a more general tour and the other was a Medieval Stained Glass tour. We were told to try the Medieval Stained Glass tour since it is offered less frequently but later we decided we probably would have enjoyed the other tour better. Oh well, it was still interesting. :)  This was when we learned what I already mentioned about the River Ouse. Our next stop was a church.

The stained glass in this church is almost all original. They took it down during the war and stored it to protect it from damage. It was very interesting to hear him tell all the stories that each window represented. I didn't really realize until later that I never took any pictures inside :(  Walking through the inside of the church you could see writing on the stone panels in the floor. I asked him about it and he said they were all gravestones. He mentioned that there are so many medieval stones in England that you'll find them in walls and floors all over the place.

One of the most interesting things we learned from out guide was about all the burials in the city. Apparently the ground has risen about 12 meters over hundreds of years. People were constantly burying their trash along the streets and their dead in graveyards around churches.

Here you can see some of the old grave stones. This was actually a little plot of land raised about 4 and half feet from the road we were standing on. The guide said that if you were to go digging around in there you find human remains pretty quickly. As he was telling us about this, a shop owner standing outside to smoke mentioned that the city had done some digging outside the shop and found some remains just below the surface. I guess they checked them out and found that they were over 150 years old.

After our tour we did some more walking around in the city. Here are some pictures of the city streets.

This last one is one of the oldest streets in the city. It was crazy to see how far those buildings overhang the street. You can kind of tell in this picture but they are slanting so much. I wonder how structurally sound they are.

Our last event for the day was to watch a light show displayed on buildings. I'd seen youtube vides of this before but it was really neat to see in person.

The lights were being displayed on the castle museum. If we have enough time to go back to York I'd like to go inside. We didn't get a chance this trip.

I couldn't really tell if it was supposed to be a story or not but it was Halloween themed.

I love the invention of Wikipedia. I know its not the most reliable resource, but it allowed me to refresh my memory on everything I saw last weekend. I'm sure I'll be using it a lot over the next few months. It's hard to take in so much information over weekends filled with sight seeing.

We've already started planning some of our upcoming trips. This weekend we're going to Edinburgh, Scotland. We're hoping to go on a tour of St. Andrew's but if there aren't enough people signed up they may not hold it. Our plans for Thanksgiving now involve Paris! We're flying out there on Thursday, going on a Normandy D-Day beach tour on Saturday and coming back Sunday evening.

I haven't done too much exploring in Leeds yet. I visited the art museum today and Daniel and I have walked around the town a little bit. I'll try to take some pictures this week and do some more exploring so I can post about the city on Thursday or Friday.

Janelle