Lord Mayor's Reception

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Today we were invited down to Bradford's City Hall for a reception and welcome from the Lord Mayor and Mayoress to all the International Students. There was a reception in the main banquet hall which included coffee/tea and desserts/biscuits. Then the Lord Mayor spoke and welcomed us to the city. He seemed very nice and joked around with us a bit.

Then we took a tour of the building itself. It is a marvelous building, the architecture and decorations make it feel very regal. I have noticed that the British like to use a lot of blue, blue doors, blue carpet, blue ceilings.

Then the Lord Mayor spoke and welcomed us to the city.

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Our guide told us a story about the coat of arms, which includes a tongueless boar. Back when Bradford was just a little hamlet there was a wild boar that caused its citizens many problems. It was ruining crops, attacking flocks and even as the story goes carting off the occasional small child. So the mayor (or something) decided that he wasn't able to collect higher taxes because the people couldn't afford to pay them because their crops were being ruined. So he offered a reward of a parcel of land to any man who could kill the beast. There was a poor man who actually knew where the boar when to drink from a certain well. So the man set off and waited by the well, when the boar came he was able to kill it. But the poor man had a problem, he was so poor that he didn't have a horse to carry the boar back into town to prove that he killed it. What he did instead was to cut the tongue out of the boar and walk into town. A little while later a rich man, who already had massive amounts of land saw the dead boar and decided to turn it in and collect the land. Because he had a horse he was able to get into town before the poor man. The rich man was almost successful in collecting the reward, but the poor man showed up just in time and said he could prove he killed the boar. From his pocket he pulled out the tongue and so he won. All around the building you can see carvings of the well and the tongueless boar.

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I'll have to add pictures later, so come back and check them out!