The thing about travel blogs is that it's hard to find a balance between doing all the cool stuff you want to blog about, and actually, well, blogging about it.
I guess that's my way of apologising for the lack of posts. But here we are.
For the last two weeks, I've been doing an awful lot to set up my life here in York. I got a cell phone (another sign that the Apocalypse is fast approaching), got a bank account, toured the main campus and library, and walked my feet off. Seriously. There were some days when we'd leave the house at 10 and walk and walk and walk until 4 or 5.
And then there are the pubs. So many pubs. I've been to at least nine that I can name (so far) and I'm assured by the locals that I could go to a different pub every night of the year. Not that I'll be able to do so after classes start on Tuesday, but at least the option is there, right?
I've also seen a lot of York. Last week, we went to York Minster and got a tour of the place. The Minster is a pretty amazing place, in large part due to the way they sort of...cobbled it together, piece by piece as they could afford to. It's been the sight of a building since at least the Romans, and was a Norman church for quite a while, until a later Archbishop decided that the Norman style of architecture wasn't quite doing it for him, wanting instead something a little airier. Rather than scrap the whole thing, he started replacing the Minster wall by wall, first constructing a Gothic wall several feet beyond the standing Norman walls, and then knocking the existing walls one by one.
Not exactly the best idea, because their measurements were often off by just a hair, so by the time they connected everything, the line of the walls was off by about a foot. Which I suppose is not bad, in an age without calculators and AutoCAD.
On the other hand, it allows buildings archaeologists (such as myself) the opportunity to study the evolution of the Gothic style over a century of practice. See, when they first started experimenting with the Gothic style (characterised by high, arching windows, and thin stone supports in between), they didn't really know how much of a load the supports could hold. So the first Gothic windows in the Minster are pretty small, with thick supports in between. But by the time they finished, the masons realised that very little stone support was needed to hold up huge, airy windows.
It's funny, I never imagined a cathedral could be so ... asymmetrical. And yet, you can see where they messed up, and had to switch up the window order, or where they realised the wall wouldn't be long enough to have three equally sized windows, so rather than making all three smaller, they just adjusted the size of the last one.
(On a related note, there's a pub just down the street called the Three legged Mare. It's called the Wonky Donkey by locals. Coincidence? I think not. This Minster is decidedly wonky.)
I've also walked the walls, which is supposed to only take about and hour and a half, but with several...informative detours, it took us three hours. But it was a nice day, and we found a lot of other stuff, so it was well worth it.
(Hey look, Ma! I'm alive!)
And yesterday I went on what can only be characterised as an Epic Hike. I have a bunch of photos, so I'll be sure to post again soon!
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