A Week in York part tres

 Ah yes, so what did I do next?   I don't really know... because the next day's pictures were vague and apparently we didn't get in to the things we were gonna see... here is Becky protesting at the gates of the Jorvik Viking Center

 

You see everything in York closes early...

But I did get a shot of this beauty ========>

This is Clifford's Tower by day. It is the main tower of the now defunct York Castle.

This is the problem with relying on pictures for your memories.

Well the next day we were determined -so we marched right back up to Jorvik and Clifford's and made it... but I only have pictures of the tower... so you will have to make do.

Pretty good views though right?

And that was the story of Clifford's Tower  (click here to read about it)

Experience at Jorvik after the break



So when I was about 8 years old my parents got divorced and my Mother and Grandma took all of us boys around England, Scotland and Wales (I almost spelled it with an H).

Anyway Jorvik was the only tourist site I remember from York, though I am sure we also saw the Minster and possibly Clifford's Tower as well. These sites had nothing on Jorvik, but really all I remember is being overwhelmed with the idea of Vikings. Growing up I had always been interested in Knights and Castles, but hadn't really gotten into things like the Romans, or the Vikings (both of whom made York their home-Eboracum, Jorvik), so seeing Jorvik was eye opening. Not to mention the main thing I remember was a video or how they had reconstructed the face of an actual viking from Jorvik (York) using the skull and doing exactly what my friend Alicia now does (or did in grad school).  It was just a whole new world of possibility and I didn't even remember much.
So this time I was excited to go back.

Jorvik kind of smells like urine, but the floor in the first room shows you the layouts of an archeological dig they did in the basements of York... which is all well and good but you don't really get a feel for what you are looking at until the second part which is the amusement style ride through a mechanical simulation of daily life in Jorvik. The "people" are kind of creepy looking but all of a sudden you kind of enjoy the urine smell because it seems to fit with the setting.  The narrator tells you about different people and activities going on in the town and eventually you are let off the ride to enter a more familiar museum like setting. Electronic displays give you information on Viking customs, trade routes and historical raids. Wall displays show actual artifacts and give information about how they found them, what they are made from, where the materials are from and how they might have been used. A really cool part of the museum shows some human skeletons and then goes through a sort of 3d animation of what the person looked like, and tells details based on the skeletal structure of who they might have been, where they might be from and how they might have lived including pointing out injuries and birth defects "this small woman probably walked with a limp" kind of thing.   A similar display was used at the Yorkshire museum, but this one seemed a little more high tech.   As the museum went on it gradually showed the downfall of the Vikings and makes some allegations that some of their artifacts might have been used during important events that changed the history of England.
Anyway I liked it.
Then we spent a whole bunch of time in their gift shop looking at books -some of which I am pretty sure I looked at as a kid.
Still despite the nostalgia I couldn't really convince myself to buy anything...
check out the google images if you want to see inside the museum.