Allie Goes Global

Now, there’s something worth knowing about me… I hate a festival. Or a parade. Or really anything that is going to bring people to a place in droves. York has a famous annual Viking festival, and when I booked my travel, the dates for the festival had not yet been announced. It could be any time in February, and all I could hope is that it wouldn’t overlap with the two days I was planning to be there. Well, we can all guess what happened next.

I won’t relent on my stance that having too many people in one place is irritating. However, I will relent and say that the Viking festival was pretty dang cool. It just made it harder to get around, and, ultimately, cut my time in York quite short. But we’ll get to that later.

My first stop in York was York Minster, and I again opted to do a tour, rather than just wander around on my own. This was definitely a good choice, because it’s an extremely detailed building. I absolutely would have missed some things just looking around.

I took more pictures of the inside of the minster than is frankly healthy. I would lose any and all readership by sharing them. But I’ll throw in a couple.

From here, I walked to Bettys (yes, without the apostrophe). I wanted to have one high tea while I was in England, and Bettys is an institution. It seemed like the perfect place. There was quite a line to get in. Sort of an odd thing: I tried to make a reservation in advance (as in months in advance), but they don’t allow you to make a reservation in their online system for one person. I found somewhere on the website that said that you could call to make a reservation for one, but I’m not making an international call for that. So I found myself waiting in quite a long line to get it. However, it moved pretty quickly and made for good people-watching in the meantime.

I have two great aversions to British sandwiches: the use of mayonnaise in everything, and cucumbers. Just, in general. So I was a little worried about what I was going to be eating, since I didn’t think I would be able to dodge both cucumbers and mayonnaise. I didn’t need to worry, as it turns out. Two of the sandwiches did contain mayo, but mixed into other things, so it was fine. And there wasn’t a cucumber to be found.

I opted for the champagne tea, and the menu was as follows:

• A selection of sandwiches
  • Egg mayonnaise and cress
  • Smoked salmon and dill cream cheese
  • Chicken and pesto mayonnaise
  • Ham, Fountains Gold cheddar, and fig & port chutney
• A sultana scone with strawberry preserve and clotted cream
• A miniature cake selection
  • Sticky toffee gugelhupf
  • Raspberry and apple tart
  • Chocolate cube

Genuinely, there were no misses here. I would do dangerous things for that ham, cheddar, and chutney sandwich, and the chocolate cube, though oddly named, was incredible. Even the tea was good. Which you would expect, but I had some horrible tea on this trip. Not what I would expect from such a tea-heavy country.

Now, at this point, I did have another reservation for an activity, but not for like three hours, so I set off to check out the Viking festival. It’s set up throughout the whole center of town. Basically, every time you turn a corner, you find another part of the festival. There were musicians playing traditional instruments, people demonstrating various handicrafts, and a load of people in Viking outfits. I found a booth with people offering assistance, and had one of the more interesting conversations I had on my trip. He told me that if I walked down Mickelgate, I would find the merchants hall. After that, he said, I could go behind the building through a snickelgate, and I would find more of the festival. I asked him what a snickelgate was, and he laughed and said I couldn’t miss it. So I set off down Mickelgate to find a snickelgate.

The merchants hall was in an old half-timbered building and was home to the adventurers guild. It was aggressively packed with people, but sold some really interesting stuff. I seriously considered buying a drinking horn for a friend back home, but I was traveling with hand luggage only, and I figured there was no way it wouldn’t get damaged in transit.

Without going into it too much, no one at the merchants hall had any idea what a snickelgate was, and even after looking around, I did not see anything that could match that description. So I think I may have been had. Oh well.

I decided at this point to go check out the city walls, and once again, my sense of direction failed me entirely. I walked a full fifteen minutes in the wrong direction. I did find the wall (benefits of a round city), but it was the bit on the opposite side of town from where I intended to be. Once I made my way back to the correct part of town, I went to go check out the shambles. They’re one of the major tourist attractions of the city, a narrow pedestrian street of shops with just about everything a tourist might want. However, there were so many people and they didn’t know how to behave in public. Even though the street is maybe four people wide in certain places, people were still stopping right in the middle of the street to have conversations, forcing people to try to push around them. At the point where I very seriously considered kicking someone’s suitcase out of my way, I realized that the stress of the crowd was getting to me, and I needed to escape.

I did, however, buy a hoodie. See, I had been having problems with my coat through this whole trip. Seems an odd thing to say, but there we are. I had picked out a beautiful, knee-length green peacoat for the trip, in preparation for the February weather, but it was just a pain. If I had to go to the bathroom, I had to take it off. Everywhere I went indoors, I had to find a place to put it. It was just a lot of coat to manage. So, like a pure tourist, I left the shambles with a too-small hoodie with York proudly emblazoned across the chest. I have lost the ability to feel shame.

I also then had to go at great speed back to my car, halfway across town and through a rather muddy park, so I could get rid of my coat. I arrived back at my destination very sweaty, but minus one annoying coat. Job done.

My final stop of the evening was York’s Chocolate Story. York does actually have a fascinating history with the chocolate industry, and this experience was well worth the time. The group is taken through an interactive exhibit where you learn all about the history, and finally, into a room where you pour your own chocolate to take home. I had also booked the additional truffle rolling experience, and that was a lot of fun. I can’t vouch for the flavor of the truffles because, quite frankly, I forgot to eat them and didn’t find them in my suitcase until months later.

Now, onto the part where things get bad, my hotel. I won’t be saying the name of the hotel, but it was outside of the city center and named after a famous British queen of the 1800s. Can’t get in trouble for that. It was another hotel above a pub. Now, I realize that I forgot to mention this in my posts about Chester, but the two nights I was there, the pub had live music. This meant that it was impossible, even with ear plugs, to get a good night’s sleep. So by the time I arrived at my York hotel, and the landlady cheerfully informed me that there would be live music that night, I was already not in a good place.

I was shown up to my room, and was, shall we say, unpleasantly surprised. I’m not normally one for obsessively checking beds, but because of the overall rundown state of the room, I figured this would be the place to check. I exposed the mattress and was greeted by a host of black specks all over the mattress, along with other spots which could have been either blood or droppings.

So I went downstairs and very discreetly informed the landlady, who was horrified. She came back upstairs with me and inspected the mattress. This was the point at which she informed me that what I was seeing was not bedbugs, but dirt. She pointed at the window box outside the window, told me that they leave the rooms open to air them out, and that dirt and mulch sometimes blows in. Don’t get me wrong, dirt is better than bedbugs, but still not an extremely satisfactory answer when your bed is covered in dirt. Add to this that the bathroom had a mold problem and wallpaper hanging down in full sheets, and I didn’t particularly want to stay.

Now here is where the Viking festival becomes a problem. I’m a very flexible traveler, and I would have just packed up and left for another hotel. No big deal. But every hotel in town was booked. I managed to find one room available at over $700 for the night, and nothing available the next night, and this was certainly not in my price range.

I was left with two options: I could stay in this hotel that I was uncomfortable in (and as the music kicked off downstairs and began rattling the walls, this seemed like less of an option). Or I could leave York a day early. I found a Holiday Inn basically in the middle of nowhere and booked it for the next night. And then I slept that night on top of my fully made bed, curled up under my horrible coat. I guess it was good for something in the end after all.