August 7, 2004 York

4:50 pm We arrived in York earlier today and are staying at the Sycamore Guest House. We're sitting in York Minster getting ready to hear an evensong. This church is enormous and pretty. York is hot and busy. But cool. We ate lunch at Café Concerto. I got a potato, zucchini, and parmesan frittata, and she got a mozzarella and veggie baguette with tomato soup. YUMMERS. We walked around and around, ambling through the Shambles and on streets called things like Stonegate and Swinegate. To get to town from our B&B, we walked through the prettiest little park with a museum and some abbey ruins. I finished Under the Banner of Heaven on the train here and felt utterly disgusted by the whole situation. I can't think about it anymore right now, though, because evensong is about the begin! 9:00 pm Showered at last! The Syracuse Guest House has a gracious owner and a sink in the room and it's just lovely. It's away from the hubbub of central York, so that's nice. We are so tired! We went to an Italian restaurant for dinner, and she had a chicken caesar salad and I had a chicken pizza with roasted red peppers and onions and garlic. We each had a Moretti and it was all very nice except for our waitress who looked like she had crawled out of the sewer. We're headed to London tomorrow around lunchtime. And I'm just too tired to write anything else, I think! ::: About this time in ... 2002: 8/7: Secondly, if Kelly Clarkson doesn't win on American Idol, then something is askew in the universe. 2000: 8/7: And I remembered again what it was like for me in the beginning -- before it became everyday and annoying and tiresome -- sort of just plain lovely, through the wide eyes of a fourteen-year-old girl on her first visit here with her parents and her brothers and her sister -- who wanted nothing more than to walk the real streets of Paris, an ocean away -- to see the real Eiffel Tower. get notified. journal archives © Copyright 2004 elb

transcribed from paper journal