York

Today I went to York. York is a city in the north of the UK, and is ...uhhh you know what?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/York

Before I go on I would like to say that today reminded me of Rachel Chia for so many reasons! Love you Rach!

So this morning Teresa came to my room at 6.30am and we had muesli for breakfast, left over from my YHA days.

We left the house at 6.40 (okay, maybe more like 6.45 by the time we left, but we were aiming for 6.40!) to catch a 6.54 train from Denmark Hill to Victoria, to catch a tube to King's Cross, to catch a 7.47 train to York. This is us at King's Cross Station, about to board the train!

The train ride was pretty. It was still misty.

We got to York at about 9.40, and proceeded to spend the next 20 minutes in the station taking pictures, cos the station was pretty and we loved this place already.

Then we walked towards the city centre, looking out for a bakery type thing where we could grab some morning tea. We found this scout group having a little secondhand book sale. Between Teresa and I, we got 3 books for £2. They also had a little cafe set up, and we had a slice of cake each! I had German apple cake and Teresa had a walnut sponge. The cake was only 80p a slice, and it was yummy! 

Next we went to the Shambles. The Shambles is a narrow little cobblestone laneway with small shops. Very medieval-England-like. We were actually on our way to the Shambles when we found the Scout thing on the corner of High Ousegate and the Shambles (yes, those are street names).

So we walked 2 steps down the Shambles and then got distracted. As you will see, this distractedness becomes a recurring theme.

We got distracted by a market.

 Looked through some vintage clothes but didn't want to buy anything cos we'd have to carry it around the whole day.

Then we finally got back to the Shambles and slowly wandered down it, walking into the shops that looked interesting. Took some pictures.

 Little Shambles is a street off Shambles

The roofs, and therefore the doors of the shops were quite low.

After that we followed the street signs to the "Castle Area", to climb Clifford's Tower.

Clifford's Tower is a Norman fortress built in the 1200s, with spiral staircases built into the wall, but it has since lost its roof and now the staircases are used for tourists to climb up and walk the circumference of the tower. Pretty good view of York, especially York Minster, as you can't actually see a whole  of it at ground level in front of the Minster due to it being near narrow laneways.

Anyway, back to Clifford's Tower. This is picture with York Minster in the background.

And this is the inside of Clifford's Tower.

Clifford's Tower only took half an hour including lots of time for pictures, cos it was really small, like literally just one open-top round tower. After that we made our way to York Minster.

Well. Tried. Found this really cute shop.

Back out on the street, there were heaps of buskers and street performers.

 (American Indians? Reminded me of Pocahontas)

Then there was also a brass band like 2 minutes down the road.

There were also a few cute old English bookstores. 

This one was on Minster Gate just before the Minster.

 Teresa and I, being booknerds, had to go in and have a look, of course. There were several rooms of both new and secondhand books. Teresa bought a small red leather bound copy of Charles Dickens' Oliver Twist. SO ENGLISH! Love it.

After that we finally got round to York Minster itself. There was a sign outside that said it only opened at 12.30 on this particular day, and it was 12.15 so we were like "sweeeet". So we just stood in the queue. It wasn't that long. Turns out that parts of the church (the High Altar and the Quire) weren't open that day, so we got a discounted admission of £5.50 instead of £8.

The nave

The Chapter House Windows

York Minster is probably best known for the Rose Window in the South Transept, which has pictures of white and red roses to commemorate the union of the houses of Lancaster and York when Henry VII married Elizabeth of York. The rose window is that round one at the top.

We ended up spending an hour and a half there, because there was quite a lot to see in the crypt, and there was also a little museum attached to the crypt. By the time we got out it was 2, which means we'd missed lunch. Or the time that would normally be lunchtime. We didn't want to go find lunch if it was already 2, because...

Another must-do on the list was Bettys Tea Rooms, which Berlin recommended for afternoon tea because it was quaint and English and because it had really a really good house blend tea. There are actually two in York, Bettys and Little Bettys. We found this one on Stonegate and went in. We didn't even think about which one it was, even though we knew there were two. Turns out it's Little Bettys, cos we found a bigger Bettys down the road after we'd finished.

Little Bettys actually looked cuter, it was like a little house. Betty's just looked like a massive room on the corner of a street that had ceiling to floor windows. Little Bettys had a shop selling their products downstairs, and the tea room was upstairs. 

So we got there, and there was a MASSIVE queue. We waited for 45 minutes before we got a table- at least they tried to speed up getting people in by handing out menus to the people waiting in the queue so they could decide what they wanted. I actually quite like the fact that the place retained their class by not squishing everyone in. The tea room was quite spacious and they could have easily fit a few more tables in, I mean, they DID have lots of customers waiting, but it was nice that they kept it nice and quiet so you could actually enjoy the atmosphere

We both ordered the Yorkshire Cream Tea-
 house blend tea with two scones and strawberry jam and clotted cream.
Here's the spread.

Our scones were served on a three-tier platter! That got me excited.

We finished at about 3.45, so we had a bit more time to walk about before catching our coach home at 4.25. We decided to catch a coach home instead of a train because we found a 50% off  voucher for National Express coaches for students, which made it a bit cheaper than the train. I would've probably still taken the train if I were by myself because the train took 2 hours and the coach took 5, but Teresa didn't have a railcard that gives students 1/3 off fares (I do), so it would've cost her a lot more. So we decided we'd take the coach and just sleep or something.

So yeah we had some time, and we'd thought we'd go back to Shambles because we saw a place that did £1 sandwiches, and we needed to grab something for dinner on the coach.

The place had run out of bread :(

 Next minute we knew it was 10 past 4, and so we quickly grabbed a sandwich each from Costa and rushed to the bus stop.

AND THEN THE COACH DIDN'T COME FOR ANOTHER HALF AN HOUR. 

We were starting to worry that we'd missed it, because we DID cut it pretty fine arriving at the bus stop. But there was another lady with a suitcase and she had a National Express ticket, so we felt better.

This is a picture of us being not happy.

On the bus we took pictures of the sunset over the countryside. We stopped briefly at Sheffield and I bought an ELLE magazine to entertain me for the rest of the journey. The newspaper was too intellectual for that time of day, so I went for some trash, I mean light reading. It felt odd; I haven't bought a magazine since I was like 16.

We did end up making it back to Victoria before the scheduled time.

The day was a success :)