MONDAY-York

Founded by the Romans in 71 AD, York has a rich heritage reaching back 2000 years! Surrounded by all this history and culture, naturally, we spent the day shopping.




There is a huge pedestrian area with shops and restaurants just the other side of the river from our hotel. After yesterday's disgruntlement of shitty travel, we slept in ("lying in" as they say in England) and headed off to eat pastries, pub food, and shopping!

We split up after lunch and went our own way. Jeri got some really lovely things and an excellent pair of boots. She also enjoyed an appointment at a Chinese massage place nearby as she had a pretty stiff neck from the long train ride yesterday.

I enjoyed people watching, listened to a very fun little english/celtic street band that you can listen to by clicking here, bought tea, browsed a few tobacconists, and had an awesome haircut and hot shave. The shave was pretty fantastic and slightly different from the one I had in Paris a few years ago (I don't get a shave that often, so they're pretty memorable and special for me).

This fellow did a lot of lathering with the brush, finished the shave in only two passes (Paris, it was like getting shaved six times), and rubbed a small alum block across the areas that get nicked up the most from at straight-razor. That was a delightfully, prickly burn, but it did stop the nicks from bleeding.

After this I was asked if I wanted my ears flamed. I had no idea what this was and asked him if he meant was ear candling (cuz that's a hoax I'm not interested in paying for - sorry ear candling fans). He said he didn't know what that was, but this was using fire to trim my ear hair. They were pretty furry, so I agreed. My barber proceeded to bat my ears with a flaming cotton ball soaked in denatured alcohol. Pretty darn effective at removing ear hair! Here's an example of someone else getting it done, click here.

Moisturizer and a hot towel after, a nice backrub, and finished with some Turkish lemon cologne that I really enjoyed-- smelled lightly of fresh lemon peel :).










While I wandered the street, I enjoyed the names of some of the businesses and took some snaps so you could enjoy them too.

We had dinner tonight at an Italian place. The English seem to have italian restaurants all over. I thought I'd see Indian restaurants everywhere (well, the pubs all do offer some indian dishes in their menus alongside traditional pub food) based on watching too many reruns of Red Dwarf. We've had Italian twice since coming here and it really has been pretty excellent.

All in all, a nicely relaxing day in York!