A Big Adventure to York and Manchester

I realize it's been a while since I've done something really exciting... I've been mostly working on school work and such but this past week was READING WEEK and so I figured I really should go on some sort of an adventure. A classics buddy and I were planning on attending a postgraduate conference down in Manchester and I decided to head down early and stop off in York to visit all those crazy archaeologists I met in Wales in 2005.

So the friend I was staying with in York came and met me at the train station and we walked around the city walls in order to drop my stuff off at her flat before going off exploring. As we rounded the corner by the castle, I was faced with a small field full of Canadian geese. Medea, being very confused, wonders why there would be Canadian geese in England, after all, it's not really on their migration path (unless they got really lost and headed east instead of south). Apparently, a university professor brought them over as an experiment. After watching the Geese for a bit, we spent most of the rest of the day wandering around the walls of York, stopping off at a couple pubs along the way.

Unfortunately, everyone that I know in York was working this week, so I took the opportunity to explore York on my own, trying to fit in as many touristy things I could. The picture here is Clifford's tower, part of York Castle. It was a gorgeous day for walking around. I went to Clifford's tower first, climbing up to the top where one gets a fantastic view of York. I then headed off to the Castle Museum. It's a random collection of all sorts of different stuff, starting with period rooms (like 17th century dinning halls and such), then as you turn the corner you come face to face with a hoover display (that's vacuum cleaners for my North American audience). Kind of catches you off guard. It has a rebuilt Victorian street, the history of the hearth, a jail, and all sort of other stuff. Quite a fun little museum to go to. I'd recommend it to anyone heading off to York for the sheer randomness of it's displays.

In the afternoon, I headed off to York Minster. You can see it from almost everywhere in the old city and I was quite excited to get a look inside. It was truly amazing. I took tons of pictures inside (which I can't post all here, it would just take up too much space) and even paid the extra money to go down to the crypt and the treasury. I'm slightly torn though, since it takes 2 million pounds a year to keep the place standing. As much as I am a historian at heart and hate to see old buildings become ruins, it pains me to think that the money to keep this building looking pretty could really be used to help people who really need it. So frustrating. I don't really know what to think.

Since the friend that I was staying with works for the archaeological research council in York, I got to go to some other tourist places for free. York has "Jorvik, the interactive viking centre" which has a "sights and smells" tour through what York was like as a Viking town in the 10th century. Quite fun. They've done a neat job of laying out the town with all the artifacts they'd found from the excavations. However, it is pretty cheezy with these moving robot vikings and random sounds. I then got to go to DIG which is where the archaeological research council has more artifacts from their digs around York as well as an area set up as an archaeological site where kids (and adults I guess) get a plastic trowel and can learn how to dig. There are different boxes for different time periods, with a bunch of artifacts glued to the bottom just waiting to be discovered. I ended up being the only "customer" in the building and so got my own private tour. It was quite fun playing in the fake dirt (it was made up of little pieces of rubber) although I was definitely not using proper archaeological technique. We then moved on to the bone trays which I absolutely loved and ended up actually teaching my tour guide something about bones since he hasn't really done that much work with them. All in all it was a great time.

York itself is a great town with a huge amount of history. It is however, very touristy and so has a lot of really cheezy stuff as well. I can't even imagine how much history is still in the ground that hasn't been found yet. Recently, one of the pubs in town decided to expand its cellar and ended up finding the ruins of a Roman bath. I loved being there and just being about to wander around the town taking in the sights. It was definitely a great little holiday.

On Saturday, I got on the train to head to Manchester. It was definitely a little bit of a culture shock since I have been in such a small town for the last 2 months it was very weird to be in a big city. The conference itself was great. I got to meet some really interesting people and heard some really interesting papers (which weren't presented well), some boring papers (which really weren't presented well), and some fantastic papers. I guess that's why it's good to participate in these postgraduate conferences. Since it is all students it's a less intimidating experience and a good way of getting more experience in presenting papers.

I apologize for the length of this entry but hopefully that will keep you all going for the next little while as I am now back into crazy work mode (I have a paper to present on Thursday and have to have a preliminary plan for my PhD for my supervisor next tuesday). Hopefully, I'll have time for some adventures but for the time being, I'm back in the library, hanging out with my books.