Some sightseeing

I finally got a chance to see some of the sights in the past two days. International student orientation is tomorrow and Saturday, with classes starting on Monday. So yesterday I wandered around the Yorkshire Museum and the Museum Gardens. The Museum was kind of cool (literally built on top of ruins of St Mary's Abbey, destroyed after the Dissolution care of Henry VIII and his quest for divorce/annulments.) Lots of Roman stuff, Anglo-Saxon stuff, and Medieval stuff, including the Middleham Jewel, which is pretty cool. I couldn't take pictures inside though, so if you're curious, there's a picture here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Middleham_jewel_1.jpg

The Gardens are really nice. Not as big or impressive as, say, the Boston Public Gardens, but it has super cool stuff like these ruins of the abbey. I'll be attending classes in King's Manor, which is right around the corner and was originally the house of the Abbot of St Mary's. After the Dissolution, it because the headquarters for the Council of the North.

After wandering around the Museum & Gardens, I took a walk along the medieval town walls, which are largely still standing. While you can't walk a complete circuit around the original city, long stretches are still standing; some parts are even the original Roman fortification walls, although most of the extant walls are post-Viking incursion. Fun fact: York has more miles of intact city wall than any other English city.

Here is Bootham Bar, one of the four gates into the medieval city. From here, you can climb up a stone staircase to gain access to the inside of the Bar and then on to the wall proper.

From the Bootham Bar section of the wall, you can get some pretty awesome pictures of the Minster. I'll try and put up some of my minster pictures on facebook because there are way too many for a few blog entries. Especially since today I went to the Jorvik Viking Centre and did the full Minster extravaganza- the Minster proper with guided tour, the Museum/Crypt/Treasury, AND the Tower, which required climbing up 275 uneven stone steps in a super narrow spiral staircase. Whew. But the view was totally worth it. But I'll save all that for the next entry. :)