York (August 6th)

In York were got dropped off at noon and had until eight at night to walk around. This would have been great except in Europe everything closes are about six at night…so we had a lot of time to wander around. We started off with a walking tour…which minus a few cool facts was lame and im glad I didn’t have to pay for it. York is a cute little town that is completely surrounded by a stone wall. Even our bus wasn’t allowed inside and we had to be dropped off outside of the city. It was a wall built by the Romans and most of it is underground. There was one place on the walk where you could see three ruins of walls. The first was the wall of an old hospital, the second was the roman wall, and the outside wall was a medieval wall. Also in York there was a large cathedral in the center of town. It was beautiful. I learned that a few years back it burned down and the giant rose window was shattered into 40 million pieces. Amazingly enough they were able to salvage all of the pieces and put it back together! Finally the last cool fact I learned about York is that it has the smallest police force in all of Europe. It consists of 11 policemen, almost all of which look after the cathedral.
After our little tour four of us went to this awesome smoothie place and then went on a tour of some dungeons. It was almost like a haunted house, it was really scary and they showed you all of the gruesome history of the city. We saw torture champers and tools that they used for it. We also saw the history of the Vikings and how they murdered hundreds of Anglo-Saxons when they arrived. It was all interactive and at one point I was put on trial for witch craft. I was of course found guilty and sentenced to hang. Fun stuff. After that little adventure we found this amazing restaurant. It was this little place where I had this great bean burger in a pita and corn on the cob. They let you choose how spicy you want it and they had these amazing sauces to cook them in. it was so good that I bought some of the sauce and we all plan on making the food when we get back.