Settling in in York

I had anticipated that my four days of settling in would not involve any fibre-related explorations, but how wrong that proved to be...

From a fabric store around the corner

Obviously buying buttons in York will be easy-peasy!

From "Buttons at Duttons" haberdashery... 

Ok, now to actually settling in... I arrived on the hottest day on record, July 1, and made my way via "the tube" from Heathrow 4 to London King's Cross, where I caught a train to York. That this plan would work was not a given, after all - it was so hot that all trains to Leeds (not that far from York) were cancelled because track integrity could not be guaranteed in the heat. Wow! 

The City of York is beautiful, preserving in its large core a swath of history that goes back 2000 years to the Romans - Constantine visited in 305 - but also bears evidence of Vikings, Angles, Saxons, Normans, and just about every English king on historical record. It's hard to do justice to it in a blog post by a neophyte (moi). You'd best google it, to see all the wonderful buildings and the narrow cobbled maze of streets, but here are a few teasers as I've encountered them.

My best route to The College - options are walk, cycle, bus - takes me through Monk Bar (gates in the medieval city wall are called "bars"), underneath a museum dedicated to Richard III.  It's part of the city wall - York has more intact city wall than any city in England (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/York_city_walls), much of which can be walked, providing magnificent views of the city centre.

Monk Bar and Richard III Museum

City Wall Walkway

Especially the magnificent Minster, York's pride and joy, can be seen to advantage:

View of the Minster from the Wall

There will be more for me to do than I'll have time to do it - The Fairfax House, the Jorvik Viking Centre, The Quilt Museum (Kaffe Fasset exhibition!), churches, numerous other historic houses and buildings, a boat tour on the Ouse, maybe an outing to the North York Moors National Park. I've also checked out a whiskey tour on the Scottish island of Islay, but though it has me licking my chops, so to speak, I don't think I want to spend the roughly $2,000 it would cost at this time (the dollar/pound exchange is not favouring dollar owners).

At the moment settling in, for me, is less about sightseeing than getting oriented - so that's mainly what I've been doing for the last four days. I've located the College, figured out the route to get there, discovered where to get what groceries (and what groceries there are - every country is different), how to do that without a car (talk about reversion to grad student days!), set up my morning coffee routine, did laundry etc. etc. My room is in a turn-of-the-century duplex on Stockton Lane, rented from retired hotelier couple Wendy and David and their lovely old golden retriever Lily. My room overlooks the back garden, which is nothing short of magnificent:

Classic English garden beautifully tended by David

Tomorrow at 10:00 a.m. the course starts -- yeah! Tonight I'm having a drink (ales - York apparently makes great craft ales) with a woman named Martha Welland, who did the course three years ago and sings its praises. I've not actually met her yet, but I know that she is now a freelance milliner of note (http://www.stagejobspro.com/uk/theatre-professional/profile/martha-welland), specializing in period headwear of all sorts for theatre and film. Amazing how things go, in life. My first drink with a milliner!