Outing to Lincoln

Last night Gaynor, Ben, Mia, Kyle and I had a relaxing evening in. Kyle and I taught the British how to play Beirut. We had a fun time. Then we played cranium for a while and ordered Casipan's at midnight. We were all starving by the time it came and trying to eat and play at the same time.

Today Gaynor and I got up and went on the school trip to Lincoln. We were going to go to Manchester, but this was cheaper and someplace harder to get to by train. The bus ride was about 2 hours, so I was able to uncomfortably sleep for a little bit of it.

When we got there we went first to the Cathedral. Which is the third largest in England, right below York Minster. It was also the stand in for West Minster Abbey in the movie, The Da Vinci Code. We walked around first and then decided to come back and take the tour later.

There are two sections of Lincoln. The old section where the cathedral, palace ruins and castle are. Then at the bottom of the hill is the High St; where you find all the takeaways and brand stores. Connecting the two is a very very steep hill. At one point along the way they even provide a railing to help people pull themselves up the hill. I heard numerous little kids cry out to their moms that they just didn't want to walk uphill any more.

The tour was interesting. I enjoyed hearing about the little things that you don't pick out when you just walk through the place. For example she was explaining that when they carved the stones they would pick a project for the day. The master stone carver would say, "okay. we're all going to do this piece and carve flowers." You could look and see who was better at carving flowers, some more intricate then others. Then all of a sudden there is a row of pigs. It must have been a young apprentice who didn't want to carve flowers that day. The problem was that stone was so expensive that they had to use the piece anyways.

After the tour we went in search of food. It was about two by now. There were a lot of people out so all the pubs were full. finally we were so hungry that we just went into a quick place and got baguette sandwiches. We walked around some more, when into a book shop where I gave in and bought two books, which with the exchange rate cost me a small fortune. Then we wandered some more stores and charity shops looking for cheap board games for the flat.

We wandered back up the Steep St. We thought we could walk around the castle, but couldn't becuase it had just closed. too bad. The Lincoln castle holds one of the four original copies of the Magna Carta. We missed it by about ten minutes, which was too bad. So we wandered some more. The bus wasn't leaving until 5:30, but everything was closing up at like 4:30 or 5. We found a little ice cream shop where you could go downstairs and sit. So we ordered milkshakes and sat down there and read our books until it was time to go. It was very quaint. I felt like I found one of those hidden places.