York, UK

After a lovely beach holiday in Croatia (unfortunately without my husband) I flew to the UK to meet up with him. He was flying in from Italy after having spent a week in Alghero, Sardinia for a workshop. The reason for the York trip was for another one of Roy's workshops so I decided that I would accompany him since I love the UK and because I missed him after spending a week apart. I flew into Manchester and waited a few hours for Roy to arrive so we could both catch a two hour train to the lovely city of York. We took an extremely short taxi ride (as we were slyly taunted by our driver) to our superb accommodation which turned out to be a short five minute walk from the train station. We were lucky enough to find a great apartment fitted with all of the mod cons - including, to our delight, a washing machine! When you're living out of a backpack for a month or so you'd be surprised how exciting exclusive use of a washing machine is. Needless to say, I did a few loads of washing on our stay in York.

Something that delights me about the UK is the endless possibilities of eating out for vegetarians. The place is full of pubs and the thing that differs the UK pubs from pretty much every other pub is the fact that they cater rather well for the non meat eating folks such as myself. There were menus full of english staples like bangers and mash, beans, sausages and eggs - all with a vegetarian version. They seem like simple meals but the novelty of being able to eat a meal like this in a pub as a vegetarian is quite exciting - well, at lease for me anyway.

The city of York is really nice to wander around and enjoy the sights, sounds and smells that it has to offer. One of the main attractions to York is a little network of streets one of which won an award for being the most picturesque street in the UK. I'm talking about The Shambles - with overhanging timber-framed buildings, some dating back as far as the fourteenth century. It had sweet shops, souvenir shops, hat shops and many other little shops that you would expect to see in a quaint, little, paved street.

Usually on Roy's conferences and workshops the hosts organise a tour or activity for the delegates to get a sense of what the place is like. On this workshop they organised a literary tour of the city. Since it was a fairly small group of attendees, there was enough room for spouses to go so I went along for the free entertainment. I must point out now that I can't really call it 'entertainment' since it didn't really entertain many people. It might have been interesting if we were as keen about historical literature as the guide was or if majority of the group spoke english as a first language because even for native english speakers it was quite hard to understand the enthusiastic ramblings of the York born and breed guide. We humoured her for a while and acted as though we were enthralled with her tails of old, dead authors who once set foot on the soil of York city or as it used to called Jorvik when the vikings took over from the Romans - see, I did learn something! It all got a little too much after she took us down smelly little alleyways to show us the building where such and such wrote a page of their semi-famous novel or when whats-his-name took a dump in the lavatory of such and such pub. To top it off, it started to rain in true English style. Luckily we were all prepared with the free umbrellas that the workshop organisers gave to delegates as a rather appropriate gift. The rain was getting a little too heavy for our little umbrellas to keep us dry so a few of us trailed behind the group and quickly found an alleyway to dart down to escape from the boredom of the tour. We opted for a much more enjoyable activity of eating.

We had passed a Spanish tapas restaurant on our tour so we were keen to go in for some tasty dinner and sangrias to wash down the foul taste of boredom. The jugs of sangria were flowing and a large, delicious looking dish of vegetarian paella came to the table and plonked in front of Roy's and my bulging eyes. It was delicious and extremely satisfying since we narrowly dodged the prospect of spending another hour trudging around in the cold rain listening to more stories about ancient, York inspired literature.

York Minster

Roy was doing his "impressed" face

Five sisters window of York Minster.

You could tell that he was enjoying the tour immensely.

Paella! 

One of many jugs of sangria.

When we got home from our sangria-fueled, Spanish feast I found out that my Dad almost had a heart attack back home in Australia. Luckily he had seen the advertising campaigns on TV that show the warning signs of a heart attack and the ambulance came in time and gave him drugs to stop the attack from happening. In true football loving spirit, he continued to watch the game (State of Origin) that he was watching when he first noticed the symtoms over the paramedics shoulder as they were sticking the ECG electrodes to his chest.

While in hospital they found some alarming results from an angiogram. He had some blockages in his arteries which had to be fixed ASAP. Roy and I decided to cancel the rest of our Europe trip and fly to Australia to be with my family while my Dad went through his open-heart surgery. European trips are easy to cancel when something like this happens in your family. It was a long couple of flights to get to Brisbane but it was great to be with family and to see my Dad after he came out of surgery. We were only there for a week and a half but we left happily knowing that Dad was well on his way to a good recovery.