Still Catching Up

I'm still behind on updates!

This past week I finished my first British essay, then spent my whole Sunday out on the moors, getting cold and damp and so, so muddy and having a wonderful time of it. York's Outdoor Society leads hikes (simply called walks here) every Sunday to beautiful hiking places in the area - of which there are quite a few, as we're just south of North Yorkshire Moors National Park and not that far from Yorkshire Dales National Park.

This hike was at Goathland in the North Yorkshire Moors - a stunningly pretty place, all told, with big moors on top of the hills and green valleys below, beautiful forests, a raging river, old stone buildings and bridges, lots and lots of mud, and sheep wandering everywhere; everything the English countryside is meant to be, really.
And, this being England, if you take the medium walk (one short walk in the morning, one in the afternoon - maybe 6 miles all told), you spend a long lunch break in a pub in the nearest village, eating hearty food and "puddings" (dessert), drinking tea or lager, and sitting as close as possible to the radiator in hopes of drying off a bit before you set off again.
You can, of course, see many photos of this adventure here.

Other than that, it has been a fairly chill week. Last night Tom and I went to Evensong at the Minster, which was really nice. I think I'm going to be going a lot, actually. It's close, it's pretty music, it's in a ridiculously, overwhelmingly beautiful place, and it's free. All good things.

Tuesday was Shrove Tuesday, aka Mardi Gras - which is mostly known as Pancake Day here. Some Americans might recognize the concept - we used to have Shrove Tuesday pancake dinners at church when I was a kid. These pancakes were quite different, more like what Americans would call crepes. A few Brits invited some of we Americans to come have made-from-scratch pancakes in a dorm kitchen, so Tom and Anna and Becky and I filled up on so much jam and Nutella and chocolate and syrup and... well, there were pancakes in there somewhere, too. That was nice.

Tonight is a huge pub-crawl type event in town (one of the big annual social events at York), Sunday I'm going for another walk, and next week is the Jorvik Viking Festival, so I've got a full calender lined up. Should be great!

Also : Spring is coming, to a certain extent. There are snowdrops and crocuses (including some of a stunning light purple colour that looks like it is glowing) popping up all over campus, and I saw forsythia in bloom in someone's garden. It's odd, that, what with it being February, but I guess it never really gets that cold here - although we did see snow on the walk last weekend, leftovers from a big storm they had earlier that week.