York is great, a lot like Canterbury, but seemingly with more pubs. Our hotel1 was the birth place of Guy Fawkes2, and had sloping floors and four poster beds, proper historic. It practically butts up to the cathedral, not sure you can tell from my photos just how damn close we were, but I could have leaned out of the window and touched it. All the pubs push their historical angle at you, but they're nearly all great. Shopping was good here too, though surprisingly everything closes a bit early in the day; by 5pm you're meant to have stopped shopping and starting thinking about dinner.
Apart from the great pubs and restaurants of York, we went in the best shop ever]] Rafi's Spice Box3. It sells uh, SPICES, but you can also buy a complete meal kit, where they dish out just the right proportions of the essential flavour giving bits and seal it up in a bag. Here's how they say it:
Choose from 27 regional varieties and the spices, garlic, chillies and onions will be carefully prepared to your taste. So there is no fuss - no chopping onions, ginger or garlic and definitely no oil is needed. All that is required is to simmer it with some water for 5 minutes and then add raw meat, fish or vegetables and cook out. Each pack will recommend adding 1 kilogram of ingredients so it will serve between 4 and 6 people.
We got a couple of these, one Jalfrezi and one Pathia, got them home and just made them up today. You just add some water, some tomatoes, and a kilo of meat to each one (in our case a kilo of mixed veg) and follow the instructions. They were great, we had a portion of each for tea and have saved up enough for another four meals each in the freezer. You can order online, which is great! Authenticish curry but without needing to buy hundreds of different spices that you will hardly get around to using before they start to go stale.
We really appreciated being so close to the cathedral on Sunday morning when all the bells went off. I tried to catch this on the camera, but my battery ran out, check out a bit though:
We will definitely go back to York, it's quite easy to get to from London for a weekend. Now I just have to think about how I get to London in that bit before the weekend and we're sorted.
The drive back from York was not really fun. We managed to shift the car right round to the front of the hotel this time (blocking traffic for a bit, but HEY, they were only tourists too so they didn't dare get cross), and I found my way out of the city eventually. It's a long way from York back to Folkestone, the M1 is mostly roadworks still so our google maps directed us via the A1. Mostly we listened to Radio 2 on the way home, I quite enjoyed a feature on Jeremy Vine's show about how everyone who buys bottled water is scum, but it was a bit wishy washy and didn't go far enough and gave too much airtime to people who disagree with my point of view. On this subject, this from this week's popbitch4:
Justin Timberlake had 7000 bottles of Fiji
Water delivered to O2 for his gigs.
Thanks also for the link to cheatneutral.com/about5 - carbon offsetting is nonsense, I did it once and I feel like a sucker. Just don't unneccessarily do journeys and burn down forests etc, and please don't buy bottle water if you could drink tap water.
We detoured a bit to find some lunch in St Ives, luckily the one outside Cambridge so not really that much of a detour. Weather was up and down all the way home, quite grim at times. The best sunshine we saw for the whole period was when we got home to Folkestone, lovely.
No disasters at home really; I always imagine there will be a fire or flood or burglary while I'm away. The flat upstairs did bust a pipe, but somehow it didn't affect us. Builders are in today / tomorrow to finally do the earthquake repairs.
Back at work now, I just about remembered the way here, but I've completely forgotten what it is that I do.
Paul Clarke's weblog - I live in Hythe in Kent. Wed + father to 2, I am a full stack web developr, + I do js / Node, some ruby, other languages etc. I like pubbing, running, eating, home-automation + other diy stuff, history, genealogy, Television, squirrels, pirates, lego, and TIME TRAVEL.