Long Weekend: York (of smells and LEGO sculptures)

We saw the York Minster Cathedral several times on this trip, but didn't make it inside.

We're approaching the end of our planned secondment.  We've been fortunate to get most of the major locations we wanted to visit, as well as a couple that weren't on our radar.  I'm squirreling vacation days away now for a couple more big trips plus relocation time.  Kristine and the girls have gotten into a routine of meeting with friends from school or church during breaks.  This preserves everyone's sanity during a week-long half-term break (case in point, the precursor to this blog post's trip included local excursions to Calke Abbey and Rosliston Forestry Center).

Despite my stinginess about vacation time, we decided to do a long weekend trip during the February break.  Since coming over here, many people have told us we need to visit Yorkshire.  I originally wanted to do a countryside excursion like our Wales and Cumbria trips.  However, consensus from willing advisors was that we should go to York proper.  After some discussion, an added condition from Kristine to visit Durham Cathedral (more on that later), and a lovely flat found through ownersdirect, off we went.

We made the 100 mile drive from Melbourne on Friday morning.  It was on the M1, past Nottingham, and uneventful with no traffic jams.  Yes - I used all those terms in the same sentence.

Our flat was right around the corner from Botham Gate - one of the gates for the York wall.  Elise lost no time finding a window in which to curl up.  Like the pictures of the girls running, this is becoming a standard one for our trips.  Usually the picture involves Elise and a book.  This time, much to Kristine's delight, it involved Elise knitting.

  

The York Minster Cathedral was about as far on the other side of Botham Gate as our flat.  We made it as far as the outside.   I have it on good authority that the Minster is truly impressive.  However, this trip had Durham on the mind.

Our main agenda item Friday afternoon was visiting York's Chocolate Story.  It's a little museum / shop / tour that has only been open for 3 or 4 years.  I wouldn't have known to look for it, except one of my colleagues said "You're going to York?  You've got to visit the Chocolate Story."  He was right.  He didn't tell me about the pigeons outside the building.  Charis and Clare, remembering our trip to Germany, took advantage of the time before the tour started to chase every pigeon in the area.  Sorry, pigeons.

People told us about York's significance as the former capital of England, later the center of Viking power in England, and for architectural features like the Minster and the Wall.  I had not realized it's importance in the chocolate industry.  Yes, I have eaten countless York peppermint patties from grocery stores in the US and the UK.  No, I never made the connection.  It turns out there was a network of Quaker families who all got into the chocolate business during the mid-1800s (Frye in Bristol, Cadbury in Birmingham, Rowntree and Terry in York).  The Quaker prohibition against taking oaths prevented careers in government, law, or medicine (I didn't know this).  The prohibition against armed conflict prevented careers in the military (I did know this).  Given limited career options, these families were all in the grocery / confectionary business.  At the time, chocolate was a popular hot drink for the upper classes.  Frye's innovation was figuring out how to make solid chocolate.  These families shared ideas that developed solid chocolate further, and distributed it through their grocery stores.  Presto - chocolate became available in previously unimaginable form and scale.  

The tour was a well-done mix of guide, audio-visual, and tactile (mostly tasting) information about the role of chocolate in government control (Aztec rulers publicly consumed large quantities of their chocolate drink during important festivals), political espionage (the Spanish court tried to keep the recipe a secret after Cortez brought it back with him from Mexico, but it spread through Europe after a member of court sold it to the Italians), urban renewal (Rowntree and others invested heavily in improving living conditions in the slums of York on behalf of their workers), medical employment (specific tasks in the chocolate factories gave lots of work to the company dentists), and women in business (jobs in the factory gave young mothers rare opportunities to get out of the house and socialize in the evenings; the wives in the founding families helped their husbands run the factories and in some cases bucked stereotypes by running the factory themselves).  I also enjoyed hearing about the role of mistakes in the development of modern chocolate.  For example, Nestle evidently left the machine that stirred his melted chocolate turned on for a weekend.  He came back and found the consistency to be much more to his liking after the three days of mixing (previously everyone mixed for just a few hours).  Which got us the smooth texture in today's milk chocolate.

I enjoyed the informational part of the tour.  The girls put up with it peacefully.  They got more interested when the guide explained that real chocolate must be experienced with all 5 senses.  Interest became excitement when he said he was going to demonstrate, and that we would all participate.  He brought a platter around and let us each take a piece (only one, unfortunately).  Here's what he meant.

Touch - hold the chocolate on the back of your hand and savor the cool feeling.

Sight - look at the chocolate while it's on the back of your hand.  Enjoy the sight, instead of just snarfing it down as soon as you get it.

Smell - despite limited ability to smell, which is legendary in our family, I was detecting aromas by this point in the tour.

Sound - crack the chocolate.  It's not good if you don't hear a nice "Snap!"

Taste - goes without saying.  Unless one pointed out that unlike American chocolate (ahem, Hershey), it actually has taste.

The last activity on the tour was an interactive five stations that walked you through the chocolate making process.  You physically moved something (a wheel for whisking cacao bean husks, levers to mix milk and sugar or pour chocolate into the mold to set).  The friendly computer at each station chastised you if you did too much or too little, and congratulated you on being a bona fide chocolate maker if you did it just right.  5 stations, 5 volunteers staffed by 3 Collins girls.

For the final bit, everyone got a large blob of liquid chocolate poured onto a lolly (popsicle, for the Americans) stick on a tray, which they then got to decorate.  Decoration complete, the lolly went into the fridge to harden.  While we waited, we got to sample some of the high end chocolate they were making, look at displays about the chocolate industry around the world and watch a few chocolate adverts through the years (including watching some pretty clever commercials).  I might not have mentioned we got to sample the high end chocolate.  In unlimited quantities.

Some people in our family found this display amusing.  Others didn't.

Tour complete, we walked back to the flat, grabbed dinner, and savored our lollies.  4 of us savored our lollies, anyway.  For some inexplicable reason, a certain father had declined a spot at the lolly-making line because he thought he might need to help one or two daughters with theirs.  He thought wrongly, as said daughters very capably decorated their lollies with very limited oversight.  Sad father was reduced to begging and cajoling bites of chocolate lollies from the rest of his family.  Some daughters were sympathetic and gracious.  One daughter was not.  One mommy was even less so.

The Chocolate Story was engaging for everyone in the family.  It was interactive, the numbers in the tour group were kept small, and best of it all it had to do with chocolate. Perhaps it's unfortunate that we made it our first stop.  In hindsight, that was a tough one to top.  Here are the things we tried that just couldn't measure up.

We went to the Jorvik museum of Viking heritage in York.  I gather from folks I've talked with that it's kind of an obligatory thing to do.  I'm used to museums being in large open spaces - especially where archaeology is involved.  Not so with Jorvik.  The museum and dig are in a building not far from the middle of the city.  Of particular interest, it extends several stories down into the ground.  Very creative.  Unfortunately, the Saturday that we visited was the first day of the school half term break in York.  The place was packed.  Many of the displays had informative content about Vikings in York.  They were static displays, where you had to stand and read a plaque next to a case on the wall.  It would have taxed the attention of the girls under best of circumstances.  The crowds made it definitely not the best of circumstances.

The part of Jorvik that we all enjoyed (and to be fair, this is what people tended to mention most regularly when suggesting we visit) was a ride through a reconstructed Viking village.  <<INSERT GEEKY COMMENTS FROM EX-CONTROLS ENGINEER>> The ride was pretty cool.  Individualized audio commentary in multiple languages and with the guide being either an adult or a child.  The motion control for the cart on the track was fun to watch.  <<END GEEKY COMMENTS FROM EX-CONTROLS ENGINEER>>

There are times it's good to have a deficient sense of smell - like going past this are of the village that everyone else swore had powerful odors.

Or this outhouse, where our friendly guide greeted his grandfather.

Exhausted girls in tow, we made our way from Jorvik to the York Castle Museum.  This staged conflict between Vikings (I think in power) and Angles (I think resisting their authority) distracted them enough to raise their spirits a bit.

The floor of the museum that dealt with toys was mostly static displays.  I tried to cheer the girls up by getting them to follow clues and footsteps to find a hidden bear.  Not so successfully.  Clare cheerfully plopped down next to this castle, which was in one of the few corners of the floor that had tactile exhibits (e.g., toys to play with rather than look at).

Kristine and Elise enjoyed the displays about attire for weddings, funerals, and maternity.

I thought the hearse was cool.

Charis on the other hand ...

All three girls started cheering up when they got to join a "Votes for Women" march.  The good-natured policeman threw them in handcuffs, then released them and offered to make them his deputies.

Kristine's excitement shot through the roof when she found out they had a real 19th century pharmacy, staffed by someone who talked about 19th century medicine.  Her excitement dropped when it became clear that the person was an actor who was committed to following his script and not interested in talking with visitors who were interested in 19th century medicine.

There are very few things in life that a paper and set of colored pencils will not make better.  Including being exhausted and having been dragged by your parents through a couple of museums that you mostly didn't find interesting.

We made one more stop in the museum.  Somehow the girls got themselves locked inside the jail cell.

Spirits revived by the coloring, experience of almost being arrested for suffragette views, and thrill of being locked in jail, we made our way home via a restaurant serving take-away roasts with Yorkshire pudding.  This revived spirits even further and fueled bodies with energy to make a walk around the York wall.  The wall is an impressive structure going back to Roman times.  It's not as imposing in places anymore because they've built up embankments around much of it.  Originally it would have been about twice as far from the top to the ground.  We walked about half of the wall before diminishing daylight sent us back to the flat.  We walked the rest after our trip to Durham.

Open space to run = happy girls

Turrets from which to re-enact battle scenes and shoot arrows - even better!

Sunday morning we made the short train ride north to Durham.  This was Kristine's condition of agreement for our trip to York.  She learned about Durham Cathedral when she was in Scotland as a college student, but wasn't able to see it in person.  It's been on her wish list of places to visit ever since.  The girls were happy to ride on the train.  This picture was before a woman walked past several empty rows in the carriage, looked down at them, and said "Excuse me, you're in my seat.  Please get up."  I can understand kicking someone out of your reserved seat when the carriage is full.  But asking two young children to get up when the carriage is clearly almost empty?  Really?  She doesn't get any cross-cultural allowances from me on that one.

It was a dreary, but not unpleasant day to talk the 3/4 mile from the train station to the cathedral.  Here are a couple views of the cathedral and castle from our walk.

We stopped at a city square part way to the cathedral.  Fortunately for the local pigeons, Charis and Clare decided to play on the benches.

Here's the cathedral from sort of up close.

And the knocker for people seeking sanctuary.  You had to be tall enough to reach the knocker to claim sanctuary in the cathedral.  Elise's desire for refuge after crimes against her father would not be accepted.

The inside of the cathedral (which prohibited photography) was everything Kristine hoped it would be.  She was moved to tears by its beauty.  The girls and I left her to enjoy it while we wandered elsewhere.  Fortunately for us, one of the signs pointed to something comparably wonderful and exciting.  A LEGO replica of the cathedral.

Not only a replica, but one designed to be built by visitors to the cathedral.  All you had to do was convince your accompanying adult to fork over the 1 GBP fee per brick.  And then convince said accompanying adult to let you put on a second brick.  The girls swindled themselves into an unstated number of bricks that completed the tower on the left.

It was enough to make me smile.  Almost.

It was enough to make them smile.

Our last big stop Monday morning was at the Train Museum.  Like Jorvik, it had been highly recommended as being great fun to visit.  Like Jorvik, visiting on the first week day of half-term break was less than ideal.  The trains were well presented and had lots of information available to read.  If you could make your way through the crowds to the plaques on the side.  We contented ourselves with seeing Thomas

And the inside of a 19th century mailroom car.

Sightseeing complete, we walked back into town to grab lunch.  We "just happened" to make our way past the chocolate museum again.  Impulse decision to check inside was rewarded with an open table, which we quickly grabbed so we could finish our trip with some nice chocolate fondue.