During the abroad experience in England there were so many different places that caught my eye, but my top two were York and London. For this blog post I have decided to write about York! The travel days to a new place were always exciting, very worth it, but tiring due to the long amount of time on the bus and early morning. I loved exploring on the first day where we walked through the shambles and got to see all the little shops around the heart of york while making our way to York Minster. York Minster has so much history from the original building, to being struck by lightning and burning down, crowning of new power, and even the stained glass. Learning about the history of stained glass was definitely something I did not expect to be learning about on the trip. Our expert went into depth on some of the different windows and brought us around showing us some that were made specifically to tell a story including “the first advertising” which was kinda funny to think about. Another part of this trip was the high tea, honestly it was a little underwhelming; I expected there to be more going on and I think all of us were so hungry that we didn’t really have the time to savor the food. The sweets were a little weird, but the scone was really good. I loved the jam and cream cheese-like spread(I can’t remember what it was called), I would definitely have more of those!
Throughout the trip my classmates and I had plenty of time to bond and this was the city where it all definitely got close and more acclimated into the area and more willing to go out and adventure. We adventured and walked around the roman walls as a group and took some photos on the wall. Honestly I was expecting the walls to have a little more to them other than a short pathway. I was hoping to see more areas maybe where weapons were kept, but even if there were those areas it may be hard to preserve for that long of a time, I was surprised to see a lot of the roman walls still standing. We ended up at a pub the first night where we all hung out and talked about anything and everything before going back to the hotel for the night. The second night a large group of us had dinner together and the time went so fast that we were late to our next activity, a ghost story walking tour. We learned a lot about people who died and haunt the area(York is known to be the most haunted place in the world) like, someone who owned a school and the children haunted him, criminals, and children who died after being accused of having the plague by the whole town.
The weirdest thing we did was going to the Viking museum, honestly i hated the smell of it sooooo much. I know it’s supposed to preserve the history which includes the smell of it, but I wish I was nose blind at that very moment. There was no escape in that place since we were on a ride. Don’t get me wrong, I did enjoy seeing how they lived and their diets, the dyes they used and their little markets but the smell was so disgusting.
This trip was so amazing and I would not change my experience for the world, even if one classmate was different, I feel the trip would not have been so great and I will cherish this experience for a long time.
