Outgribe.com Travelogues: York

Outgribe.com Travelogues

York, September 11, Saturday, 2004

(J (my boyfriend), H (my sister), and I have been in Manchester, UK for several weeks.)

It's overcast but not raining. H is up early this morning. Around 9 I wake J and he and I eat watching the news on TV. Hurricanes are wandering around destroying Jamaica and, again, Florida. Then the newscasters apparently run out of news because they speculate on the relative destructivenesses of hurricanes and terrorists. Perhaps the two could be combined for greater effect.

The plan today is to drive to York, 1 hour NW of Manchester, as suggested by J's coworkers. But H says that she will perhaps not go, as she thinks she's been. She confirms the suspicion with my guidebook and says she'll go shopping in Manchester instead. J proposes hiking in that case, especially as the weather seems nice. I point out that nice weather would be useful for York too but J says York should be saved for a rainy day because there's much to do indoors. In fact, York was suggested because it's supposed to rain today. So York it is. H proceeds to warn us against visiting the Viking exhibit and the dungeon as both are remarkably boring and stinky. She highly recommends the cathedral, however. Then we all get ready. H looks especially fetching in her new red coat. She says she will go with us after all.

We finally get going about 11, J driving beautifully. Everyone drives fast here. J gets up to 100 mph. Are there no speed limits here? We don't know.

They don't know how to design roads here. The intersection of two major freeways (the M60 loop around Manchester and the M62, NE out of Manchester) goes through two traffic lights. The road surfaces are fine though. And bizarrely, the signs on the freeways are better than in the US. They are very consistent – everything is labeled and always in the same way. E.g., the lane indicators may be relied on to warn well in advance of an exit where all the lanes will go.

H is in the back seat intermittently listening to rock on headphones, reading about York in the guidebook, and staring out the window. Occasionally she asks sudden questions like would we like to go 100' down a mine shaft (no objections), or to a sculpture garden ( – What kind? – Modern. – No!), or how small an amplifier is it possible to get for a car. I recognize one tune she plays, modernized Beethoven, but the rest is various fast beats that could be anything. Our radio seek feature picks up no stations; perhaps our antenna isn't up but we see no controls for raising it.

En route to Leeds on the M62 it's charming, grassy and hilly. The road is raised high in the hills. Villages and a couple of towns are is the valleys below. It's now sunny with lots of different clouds.

Closer to York it's flatter. We pass through fields separated by hedges and copses. I don't know whether these are fields used for growing food or what, they're just sort of grassy, and many are obscured by roadside shrubbery. There's no picturesque grazing animals so I figure it's not farmland. Yet it seems someone cleared these fields, else you'd think the copses would cover them. You'd think they'd use every bit of land in this country for living or working or vacationing or growing food on.

A couple miles short of York we park at the Park-N-Ride. They have conveniently placed the Park-N-Ride next to a superstore. It's a big Tesco, two-storey. I like big stores like this, selling all manner of household things, big and full of weird bargains. Like Sam's Club, but not like Wal-Mart; Sam's Club has really strange big packs, and I go there only once in several years, so it's fun to explore. This place is mostly about food but there's also clothing upstairs, and a café, and it's foreign and exotic, even after I've already seen other Tescos. There's no end to the delights! The other Tescos didn't have fresh currants; here they're on sale, at 95p the box! Red, not the superior black, but still, they're extremely rare in the States.

We stop because we're hungry and had planned to grab quick salad buffet bowls by the pound like we did a couple days ago at the other superstore, but this café is small and has no salad. So, we go downstairs to look for prepackaged food but there's a big counter where they sell sliced meats and cheeses by the pound, so something prepackaged won't do. Sliced ox-tongue and beef and ham, fresh-baked wholemeal bread H asks them to slice, a scone and a croissant, the lovely Tesco hummus for sandwich glop, watercress and coriander and bell peppers, Coke and a few other odds and ends, and we have the makings for a much nicer lunch, which we assemble and eat in the car. The car's parked facing the edge of the lot, nosed into a mixed hedge so it's like a picnic lunch, and right in front of us there's juicy rose hips and blackberries that I help myself to. So everybody's happy.

At oh, 2 maybe, we're ready for the bus. It pulls up as we walk up and we buy tickets from the driver. He meets H's cheerful cluelessness philosophically which J considers abusive, but in a charming way. I expect the driver can't help it – he has quite an amazing nose, like a quarter circle but even more bulgey, and so how could he limit himself to the usual bailiwick of a bus driver? Although that is very manly and impressive. Aside from all the people issues, here they coolly negotiate twisty narrow street after twisty narrow street at a good clip in buses that bend in the middle. At one point he passed a parked bus with maybe 6'' of clearance. And as for the people issues, that can offer a decent theater of operations and H perhaps considerably improved his day by being ditsy at him. I wonder what he really is with a nose like that.

The bus ride is a ripoff, though; over £5 for the three of us, just to ride into town and back. But why shouldn't they charge a bunch? York is a big tourist destination. The people will pay. They also charge a lot for entry into various popular tourist spots like the castle tower and the cathedral.

I remark on the bus that the locals seem quite a bit more attractive than the Mancunians. There were tall well-formed blondes in the superstore and nice-looking girls on the bus. J says there's plenty of ugly here too and I must just be getting used to it.

At first we ride through the suburbs which are nice two-storey brick houses in their own green lots, then the houses lose the land around them and are contiguous and flush with the street, and then we see some of the castle wall and the old city center and are let out.

York is a charming little city overrun with tourists. There's shops and restaurants everywhere. The density of colorful hanging flower planters indicates where it's most suggested one spend one's money. Most of the buildings lining the gently curving streets are three-storey brick, sometimes partly painted, often with the ground floor exterior redone in modern style. Many have overhanging eaves. Taller or older buildings occur regularly as well – old churches, some from Medieval times, a cute sagging white house with black timbers (Tudor), I don't know what many of them are, and the huge cathedral. There's also the castle but it looks pretty recent, except for the little tower on a little hill that they charge £2.5 a person to go inside, so we don't.

Ambling down a crowded curving street we glimpse an open-air market through an archway and pop through, but only for a look. After half a minute I say I get the idea and we'll go on because J doesn't want to shop so we won't shop while he's along but on our own time. For which he's grateful. Indeed the market doesn't look so interesting, it's a bunch of stalls with generic tourist or cheap flea market junk, but of course there might be much better stuff on in another section. However, out we go back onto the little street.

Down the same little street there's a shop window with carved wooden creatures and H and I stop and discuss their merits. J doesn't mind; it's not as though we could race down this street anyway, with all the people, and what there is here is a bunch of shops so that's what one looks at. The animals are OK, but it seems there may be more interesting carvings inside. Indeed there are – bowls and plates and mushrooms. One kind of mushrooms is really neat – they're carved out of a large nut of some sort, brown and holey, which works well since the mushroom is seemingly a morel. I pick the nicest one and hold it. I hold it a while, consider it as an artistic artifact as well as a purchase, walk around, look at other stuff. This intensive consideration gives me a deep appreciation for the carving and the prospects of having bought it. In the end I get enough of both and don't actually need to spend the £20. It's an advanced shopping technique. H likes to do this for a bit and as step two to buy it and take it home and think about it; I prefer to go home and think and if I still want it later, to return. If one had to shop only by buying things one would run out of money before one got hardly any shopping out of it. Neither of us buys anything here.

J has explored this block thoroughly, he says when we come out. Indeed I saw him once walking past the shop window while I was inside. Evidently he passed by more than once but I wasn't watching.

We finish the block and exit onto a little square at the intersection. There's a charming lemonade stand and H says she'd like some, but then decides not to have any as it's too expensive. Luckily the Cornish pasty shop across the way isn't and she'd like some of that too. She gets a lamb-and-mint and a strawberry. They also have “traditional.” What flavor might that be? Ash with lard, says J. He's had a pasty in Cornwall as a child and is still traumatized by the memory. The lamb doesn't seem that bad, but it's bland.

Before too long we make our way to the grand cathedral. H remembers it as being really neat and the basement being the best part. We start with the ground floor. The first wing we walk through has lots of graves and memorials. They line the walls and range in styles from Medieval to, the latest seems to be from the 50's, commemorating the local coal miners. There's politicians, nobles, clergy, and soldiers. The soldiers' graves describe how they died – someone got pierced, someone developed some disease as a result of a battle injury, and several fell off their horses. The more recent, white marble statue memorials aren't nearly so nice as the older statues, with painted, more primitive and stylized faces and bodies. The usual arrangement is for the person to be depicted kneeling in prayer, alongside with his wife, and with smaller statues of also kneeling figures lined up under them, I guess their clerks or lesser family members. The newer white marble ones are just big boring busts.

That was one of the long cross arms; the cathedral is built in the shape of a cross. In the middle there's some more neat Medieval statues, and the other long arm has none but lots of stained glass windows that are hard to parse because the pictures are too small.

We attempt to go up the tower but that's a hefty sum extra. We already paid £19.50 for the three of us just to see the cathedral and the basement and that doesn't include the tower? Nuts.

The basement is included in the price however. It is indeed quite nice and shows diggings of the Roman fortress which was the first stone building on this site, bits of the church which replaced it, and bits the foundations of the present cathedral, which were lately found to be crumbling and were massively buttressed with modern materials. The Roman building was situated much lower than the present cathedral so one walks around at the level of its floor; over the centuries the dirt piled up. There's also artifacts and exhibits of ancient Roman life, Viking and Norman artifacts (they had also lived here), and the cathedral treasury, which is a bunch of shiny stuff people donated. One of the items is a gold chalice sporting a big diamond willed to the church by an American widow from a circus family, with no connection to the cathedral as far as anyone can tell.

It's about 4 now and H deplores that, despite having spent a total of four weeks in the UK now, she still not only hasn't had a cream tea but doesn't even know what it is. The English have tea at about this time of the afternoon and sometimes it's cream tea, which seems to be an especially nice and fancy kind of tea. Although if it's anything like the new Japanese sensation of bubble tea it can't be all that nice. That's creamy to conceal the jelly globules – rather nasty really. I remember a bubble tea place opening up near my university and it looked marvelously cute but somehow I never ended up going there and also deplored this, until years later when I finally tried the stuff, this time near my sister's university. Indeed it's inconceivable that an adult should like the stuff. Adults have enough to think about and want their tea to be relaxing. Sudden globules in tea may seem charming to Japanese youth but it's a complete reversal of the idea.

The matter can be delayed no longer. Surely York is the place for a cream tea, as set up to cater to holiday makers as it is. We consult the guidebook for a cream tea room recommendation and come up with Betty's. I consult the cathedral Information lady and she too says Betty's. Indeed, she says, nobody does it like Betty's, although you might have to stand in a queue this time of the day.

Betty's is large and packed with little tables, all of which are full, and there is a queue but it's only several parties, so we are soon seated. The waitresses have their hands full but we get menus in a bit. A cream tea is tea with scones for about £5. A more luxurious version adds sandwiches, salad, and another dessert, and costs quite a bit more. The rest of the menu is a variety of other traditional tea-time offerings – dainty sandwiches like prawn and avocado, various desserts, various kinds of tea. Daintiness is the word – the tables are tiny and white, the sandwiches and cut into crustless quarters, and there's lots of women. It's the opposite of a pub, where it's all big and sturdy and manlily dark inside, the portions are of manly sizes and you can ideally fit your elbows on the table and your long manly legs under it. When we get up from the meal J is quite relieved to get his legs uncrimped.

And what of the cream? It made no appearance. I thought they poured cream over desserts lavishly over here and that this might be related to the term but all H got for her scones was butter. It seems that “cream tea” remains a mysterious concept to us. And they didn't have cucumber sandwiches. I would have thought they would, from “The Importance of Being Earnest.”

I demand we stroll some more, and more vigorously this time – I have eaten not only most of my avocado and prawn sandwiches but most of J's treacle tart. In a half hour or so we make our way back across the river, walk a bit atop the old town wall, and then back to the bus station.

Travelogues

SF&F Movie
Reviews