whitby and scarborough

On Thursday the 20th we visited Whitby and Scarborough through a trip planned by the international society. These are towns on the eastern coast of England, about an hour away by bus ride. At Whitby we saw the Whitby Abbey which was just gorgeous, I don’t know how to describe it really besides showing you pictures but it looked out upon this town with many houses with copper colored roofs and it was right on the water and just gorgeous stone architecture. We walked down 199 stairs to get into the actual town of Whitby. I guess children used to use the stairs as a way to learn how to count, how neat  We counted on the way down and there were in fact, 199 stairs. Once we got into the town we looked around at a bunch of little shops. There is a stone, jet (it’s black) that’s famous down there and so there was a lot of black and silver jewelry. I would have bought something since that’s my favorite colors together for jewelry but nothing really struck me. Since we were on the seaside we obviously had to get fish and chips (or fish and French fries, for those Americans out there, haha). We went to a place called Magpie since we’ve made friends with a girl from Scarborough and she recommended that we go there. It was really yummy, fried haddock and front fries, but probably the greasiest food I’ve had in awhile. My stomach wasn’t too happy with me after that meal.
Then, we spent quite a good deal of time trying to find the bench where Bram Stoker wrote Dracula or at least was inspired to write Dracula. We asked about 10 people to try to find it and eventually Maggie (who was the one who really really NEEDED to see this bench) asked a tour-guide who was picking people up for a tour. Rather than shouting he came down from the bus to describe to her where this bench was and how to get there and even took her in the right direction to get there, what a nice man! So after about 45 minutes of searching we finally found this bench, and it was a nice bench thank goodness. But it wasn’t the bench he sat on to write it, they planted the bench there as a sort of…dedication or something, to the fact that the sight from that location was his inspiration for using Whitby as a part of the setting of his novel. One of the professors that I have this term ranted and raved about how we needed to see this bench so I could mention it to him that we did find it! After we found the bench we of course had to take a million pictures on it and of course a re-enactment of someone being bitten by a vampire, how could we resist?
Time to head back to the bus and onto the lovely town of Scarborough. It was about a 30-minute drive there and we had almost an hour to walk around and do our own thing there. It had started to mist a bit by this point so we went into Poundland (much like a Dollarstore, only, everything was a pound rather than a dollar, imagine that). The main reason they brought us into Scarborough was to have “the best ice cream in the north!” so we had to check out that place and man, I’m pretty sure that it was the best soft serve I have ever tasted in my whole life. I got a chocolate and vanilla twist on a chocolate covered cone and it just tasted heavenly. We went into a few more shops and then it was time to head back to the university. All in all, a great day trip. Since it takes so much effort to load pictures onto this blog I’ll just put a selection of them on here and I’ll set up another account with webshots or something so that people can view all of my pictures since there will definitely be quite a few.