Blogs from York, North Yorkshire, England, United Kingdom, Europe - page 14

Hi! I'm renting a hotel computer at the moment, free of charge as long as I give them a picture ID. YAY!!!!! This is just about the most amazing hotel ever - it has an automatic revolving door which makes getting in and out with luggage a bit challenging, and the lobby is incredible. There are 6 sets of black, brown, and tan square leather chairs set around marble tables (not glass, like I told you Mom) with zen-garden-type plants in black jars and tealights. And food and wine menus from the very high-class restaurant on this floor. Meals in the restaurant average $30. Ick. It has rained constantly since yesterday afternoon - it drizzled for most of the day yesterday, and it poured all day today. Only about an hour ago did we get the ... read more

My first day of journeying south towards London. I’ve stopped overnight in York. Such a cute town! The kind of town my mom would love - pedestrian streets with tons of cute stores. It’s a medieval town with tons of history - there used to be a Roman fort here, back in the day. It’s such a lively town, the streets are bustling. Besides all of the unique stores, there are also a bunch of open-air markets. Walking along the medieval cobbled stones, each street corner offers up new surprises. From roasted chestnuts and mulled wine, ice rinks and merry-go-rounds, crafts, flowers, sausages and cheeses, clothing, ice sculptures or Christmas carolers, it is definitely the most unique town I’ve ever been to. Wandering around town a bit, I decided to visit the main attraction in ... read more

“Let us therefore brace ourselves to our duties, and so bear ourselves that, if the British Empire and its Commonwealth last for a thousand years, men will say, ‘This was their finest hour.’” -- Winston Churchill Today is Remembrance Sunday in the United Kingdom (also observed in the rest of the Commonwealth) and in the U.S. as Veterans Day. All week, everybody in the office has been wearing red poppies to commemorate the end of World War I. In York this weekend, nearly every person we encountered wore their poppies. People laid poppies on the grounds of Yorkminster. The bands played and the soldiers marched. Time stopped for two minutes at 11:00 on Sunday the eleventh day of November. After several delays (don’t believe anybody who says that England’s trains are usually reliable), we finally arrived ... read more

well, things have been busy, to say the least. Sorry if this entry ends up being kinda choppy--I feel like there are about a million things I should be doing right now. And I'm also in a computer lab with a million other people, which always makes me nervous. Tuesday before last I got up at 5 in the morning to drive to Little Rock to fly from there, to Chicago, to Philadelphia. At Philadelphia I was picked up by Caitlin, another girl on my program, and her father, who then drove me to their home in Yardley, Pennsylvania. Yardley is a very nice town. Lots of fir trees and pretty houses. I had a quiet, restful night there, which was fortunate since I slept about two hours the night before, and then the enxt afternoon ... read more

We left Rotherham early in the morning and headed into York. Like Oxford, it was very difficult to find a parking space in the York town centre and it was also very expensive. York also has both an outer and an inner ring road around the town centre, we ended up parking in a pay carpark just on the outside of the inner ring road. (The inner ring road followed the outside of the old city walls, whereas the outer ring road was of a much higher standard and was basically the boundary of the built up area.) York is an impressive English town as it has a very intact city wall and city gates. We walked around part of the wall and visited the Richard III museum which is housed in one of the wall ... read more