Since December, I've been super excited for February because I'm going to visit my aunt and uncle in England for five months. Well...I'm in England - and it is soooo awesome! And super English :P
So the flight was pretty great. Just thinking that we were in a tiny little tube shooting across the sky took my breath away. And then there was free movies, TV shows, and music and our own personal TVs. Heaven. Those six hours went by in about one. Then arriving at the airport in Manchester was confusing. Customs took FOREVER! It only took like two minutes at the desk but about an hour of waiting to get to that desk. Finding our luggage was cool - it was like a game, finding and grabbing the right ones before they went back around the loop. Uncle Andrew was there waiting for us. It was about eight or nine in the morning in Manchester [three in the morning Canadian time, so by then we'd been awake for over twenty-four hours]. Apparently lemonade in England means 7-Up or Sprite. Not cool. And my bank card didn't work. Not cool either. And they charged me for exchanging my Canadian and American money. Super not cool. But I did manage to get about ninety-ish pounds! Cool :)
Everything in England is so much prettier than it is in Canada. It's as though they take so much more pride in where they live. The houses are all made of brick - even the rooves, and very old. There's actually laws on what you can use to build you house. There is no siding or shingles or anything ugly like that. The houses are also built very close to the roads so there's very little room for front gardens [yards]. The roads were fun to get used to. Uncle Andrew could zoom around all the little curves easily on the left side of the road, but it was kind of scary being constantly scared of hitting something.
So I'm gonna finish this up because I don't want to type much longer. But anyways, we take the bus out of Hemingbrough almost every day [there's not much to see here] and either go to Selby or York. Believe it or not, it's the same price for an all-day bus pass as it is going one way. There's a lot more to see in York, but Selby is closer and they both have these beautiful churches [Selby Abbey and York Minster].
York is so beautiful I could write a whole article on it alone. All the roads are bricked and the building are very, very close. Well, inner York anyways, which is all I'm going to talk about because the outer city is just like a normal city and very boring. The inner city is everything inside the York city walls. Barely anybuildings are new, although many are refurbished and there is hardly any traffic. We walked on top of the walls for a bit. It was really interesting seeing the little wedges for the bow&arrows. The St. Marys Church ruins were beautiful and seemed as though they should have been in the middle of a garden. One of the things that's really neat about England is that although they are very big on propertly lines, all of the ancient stonework that's open for the public is not blocked off. So we were able to go right up to those ruins and climb a ways along the bottom, but I assume if we had really climbed to the top of them, we would have gotten into trouble. Right beside the ruins was an absolutely gorgeous building. I have no idea what it was called, but it was all stone along the bottom, that English thing where they have white walls and visible dark wooden beams for the walls, and a wooden beam roof. There were also several arches coming off of one side. It was sooo pretty! There was also this really cool street called Shambles where the butchers used to have their shops. The street is tiny, all the buildings are old, and some are even hanging over the road. Afterwards, I found out that street is famous, but I didn't know that then. Among other things, we also had a tour of the York Minster, which is BEAUTIFUL! It's too much to put down here, but there is so much history behind it, what with the Romans, Saxons, Anglo-Saxons, Vikings, and so on.
Yeah, I've really gotta go now. Money is another thing too. Pounds are like dollars, but worth more. I already knew about that before I came but it's still hard to wrap my mind around because everything seems so cheap when the money is worth so much more! Seriously, chocolate bars are like 50 pence each or you can get three for a pound. Yeah. One chocolate bar is 50p.
So long!
