Day 40

Today we had our written final first thing in the morning! Well not really, it was at 9. It was for our History of the English Language class, and I can honestly say I probably studied for a total of about 10 minutes. I was not worried however, because I have taken that class before so I felt like I knew most of the stuff. The only thing I didn’t know was the question where I needed to define “functional elaboration.” But oh well. Also, the day before I had started to feel a little under the weather. I was really proud because the whole trip up to this point I have felt really good and not at all sick. So since the day was going to be rainy all day and probably chilly (I still can’t get over this coldness in August) after the test I didn’t want to go out yet. Mandy and Robyn didn’t really feel like it either so we ended up staying at the hostel for a while to do homework and then I took a nap. It felt really good.

At around 3 we finally decided to walk into York. As Dr. Chapman describes, York is on a “hub and spoke system” with the main city being the hub and we were staying on one of the spokes. So it took us about 20 minutes to walk on our spoke into the main city. We first went to York Minster, which is both a cathedral AND a minster- who knew there was a difference. If you are really curious what the difference is you can look it up, because I don’t really remember anymore. It was your typical old church/cathedral: there was a nave, some pretty windows, a quire, a tower, a chapter house, etc. It was pretty, but like I said about Edinburgh Castle, things are kind of starting to run together. When we finished there we had about 3 hours before dinner, which we were having as a big group with everyone in the program at a restaurant right by the minster. So since the hostel was a while away we decided to just check out York. We walked down the shambles, which are just some really old and narrow streets now with a bunch of touristy shops. We went to some stores including the Disney store (who knew), a fun tour/Christmas store where I saw Willow tree figurines (I have never seen those except at a Deseret Book), and a few others. We then found a bench in some square and after wiping off the rain with some napkins proceeded to amuse ourselves by putting our hoods on and taking pictures. We also watched some pigeons fight over a leaf, which they all thought was food but were too stupid to realize it wasn’t. Finally at about 7:15 we went to dinner. It was paid for by the program, and we were told we had 20 pounds to spend. Luxury! Since this was just a reasonably-priced Italian restaurant we really had to work to even get close to that, but I probably hit about 15. Since there were 35 of us dinner took for-e-ver! I think we finally left the restaurant after 10, then went back to the hostel and went to bed.