York

2014 so far has been a bit of a stressful and eventful year for me. Without boring you with the details, I will try to give a quick summary. On the negative side, my housemate lost her job and we may have to move on from the flat we currently share sooner than originally planned. On a positive note, she's found a new job starting this week which may mean we could stay on until November when our contract ends anyway. Not quite any certainties but a great deal more reassuring than the update I could have written a couple of weeks ago which I've probably already told you about in great detail if I have spoken to you in the real world recently. To have a bit of a break from all this drama and stress, I agreed to go on a short break to York with my friend Robbie. 

We got the train up on the Friday morning and arrived in York by the early afternoon. We started off by having a wander around the city. Neither of us are good at map reading so we found ourselves exploring several of York's old streets more than once as we went around in circles. After seeing the same pub a few times on our wanders, we stopped in for some dinner. It turned out to be York's most haunted pub - the Most Haunted team had apparently been there and everything. Luckily for me, we didn't see any ghosts and the food was actually pretty nice. 

The next day, we went over to York Minster. As the minster is visible from most of the city, we thought it would be the best place to start. We decided to go inside and have a look around. It reminded me a bit of Canterbury Cathedral - there was a lot of stained glass and chapels off to the sides.

 Outside York Minster

Stained glass window inside York Minster

After that, we went onto Jorvik Viking Experience, considered one of the key places to visit when in York. I'd been before when I was younger but found it a bit less impressive this time. It consisted of a small exhibit with not much information then a ride around a recreated model village with robotic vikings and weird smells. Not sure I'd go back again!

We carried on the museum theme by heading over to the National Railway Museum. Being a little bit of a geek, I enjoyed this museum a lot more. The added bonus was that it was free so we didn't have to feel like staying for longer than necessary to get our money's worth!

The next day, we decided to take it a bit easier and explore the city walls. There are about two miles worth of city wall around York to wander around and we ended up covering all of it. The walls were really interesting to walk around although some parts were quite high up and didn't have railings on the edge which made walking past people going the other way a little scary. During our walk around the walls, we also went up the remains of York castle. This featured some spectacular views of the city but meant climbing some steep and narrow spiral staircases to get there. 

Once we had explored the walls, we visited the York Chocolate Story. Apparently York was the centre of the chocolate producing industry for a while with companies like Rowntrees and Terrys based there. The tour included a good amount of free chocolate and some fun chocolate based facts. It was probably aimed at a younger age range than us though as everyone else on the tour had young children.

Having covered most of York's key tourist attractions, we left this morning and got back to London before rush hour. 

Coming up - I am going to Malaysia next month to meet up with Megan (my sister and writer of a much more interesting blog http://megs-meanders.blogspot.co.uk/ ). I will try to add some updates about our trip once I get back.