My bookish and historical weekend

The Bronte Village (and lots of bookshops)

I had the BEST weekend! My two booky friends that I met on Goodreads stayed over (one from California and one from Manchester) and we had a blast; gosspied about books looked in bookshops, bought books in bookshops (OK, we did other things too but I’m getting my priorities straight, you understand). Both Tisha and Kirsty are really into history too so we had a great time wandering round castles, little villages with cobbled streets and museums etc. I had big plans to take them to see the Bronte Parsonage too (and we did get to the actual village of Haworth where the Bronte’s lived) but alas we got distracted in a book shop (yep) and missed the house’s opening times.

York (and lots of bookshops)

On the Sunday we went to York which is one of my favourite places in the whole world. It’s a walled city and has so much history there (and lots of ghosties too apparantly). Our first stop was the Jorvik Centre which I hadn’t been in for about 20 years and it was FANTASTIC!

There is a car (like the ones you get at a funfair) that takes you round a reconstruction of York in the Viking age (this was all unearthed about 30 years ago by archaeologists where they found a whole Viking village under the city). The model people move and speak (in Old Norse) and there are the smells too. It was brilliant.

When we got out at the other end we talked to one of the staff who was dressed as a Viking for about half an hour. He was so knowledgable and passionate about the Vikings it was fascinating; we kept bombarding him with questions – it was so interesting to learn all the myths about the Vikings too: Did you know that the Vikings didn’t really have blonde hair? They were mostly dark haired in Scandanavia but used to pour wee over their heads to kill lice and the amonia in it dyed their hair white blonde. Then blonde became fashionable and desirable so they sought out bondes to mate with and thousands of years later, the Scandanavians are blonde! On the way out we (naturally) stopped in the bookshop to feed our newfound thirst for knowledge on the vikings and I got two books that look really interesting and I can’t wait to read.

Next we went to visit York Minster. The Minster is the largest gothic chathedral in Europe and took over 250 years to build (longer if you count the extensive rebuilding after the huge fire in the 1980′s). It had just finished raining as we got there and the most brilliant double rainbow came out right above the Minster; it was amazing and stopped everyone in their tracks.

I mentioned the rain, right? Well, of course, not wanting to get wet we bundled into the first shop we saw which just happened to be a bookshop (what are the chances?). It had 5 floors of books in this higgledypiggledy (or pigglywiggly as Tisha thought it was :O) ) old building.

After a stroll down The Shambles we stopped at Betty’s for “a spot ‘o tea” (again, Tisha’s saying – apparantly we Brits sound posh!).

Ahh, so now back to the working week. A nine hour round-trip in the car to a meeting yesterday (back was killing and I neary fell asleep on the M1 but did manage to get two audio CD’s played so happy about that) and lots of calls and emails and updating of pipelines to do today: groan, groan, groan! How I despise that work gets in the way of my leisure time. I want to curl up on the sofa and read about Vikings!

Anyone else been to York? Care to sharre?