July 24. York to London

We had a 10:30 tour of the University of York so we checked out of the hotel, got breakfast, caught the bus, and actually made it to our appointment 1/2 hour early. The first 15 minutes we met with a women from the international students office. She went over the basics of admissions and the financial stuff. We then met up with a student, Saher, and she took us on an hour and half tour of the campus. The University is only 50 or so years old. Many of the buildings are either kind of modern or really modern. The administration building is housed in the old (1850s) manor house of the estate the campus was built on. The campus is about 15 minutes outside of the city so many students live on campus.

After our tour we went back into the city, got lunch, took a quick walk on the town wall, and made our 1:30 appointment with Dr. Penny Bickle in the Archaeology department. The department is housed in the 16th century King's Manor. Apparently many of the British Royalty would stay in the building on their way to Edinburgh. Penny spent an hour with us as we walked around the building checking out classrooms and labs. We even got to squeeze an 11,000 year old pieces of wood that was found at the Star Carr archaeological site in England. Penny explained the Archaeology program to us and we got our questions answered. We both left quite excited about the University of York. I could definitely see Ellie as a student there.

We left King's Manor, found a bookstore (Ellie ran out of books to read and was looking for two books she could only find here), and made our 3:30 train to London.

We arrived at King's Cross station about 5:45, got our Tube card figured out, and even got our tickets to Les Miserables for Wednesday night (we have to see something when we are in London!). Tomorrow we are off to Brighton and the University of Sussex so we also stopped at Victoria Station and got our tickets sorted out for our trip down to the south coast.

We made it to our hotel about 6:45 and then went to Asian restaurant. I had a big bowl of ramen and Ellie had some chicken with curry sauce over rice. That dinner sure beat our grocery store meals. We are trying to have an early night tonight because we have to catch an early train tomorrow.