Whitby

Catching up, catching up, catching up! In actual-time, I'm in Copenhagen, my penultimate stop on the trip, and am finding it as magical and delightful and expensive as everybody has said it is. (The final two weeks of this trip are, incredibly, the only places that my lodging and transit costs will be equal to Boston rates. The Danes seem to get a little more bang for their buck...)

But let's not talk about that now! Instead, after the jump, let's have a quick little nickel summary of Whitby, videos and photos and all o' that like we likes to do!

A lighthouse between Whitby and Robin Hood's Bay, a gorgeous coastal cliffside hike. There's SHEEP on it and EVERYTHING! (The hike, not the lighthouse. "No sheep on the lighthouse," that's rule # 1 of lighthousing.)

Whitby was cute, and my first experience with the English seaside. It's funny - I think so many of our conceptions of British culture come from entertainment set in London or the countryside that it's easy to forget other pockets of England that are... very different.

Whitby from the Ninety-Nine Steps up to the abbey that inspired Bram Stoker to write Dracula! No photos of that here because it's TOO SCARY, but it's in the video above, so watch that if you need to get spooked by some birds.

Some of it's what you'd expect: fish n chips, sailboats, cute antique shops, hiking (in general, England's hiking culture is fantastic, mostly due to laws that have long upheld the right of free passage, so hikers are entitled to roam the countryside with very few restrictions). But then there's also the weird, tacky fair/arcade/casino end of things, where everything is neon and sugar and noise and suddenly you realize "ohhhh arcades were a good way to train kids to gamble when they grew up, interesting." This was going to make it into its own video but the footage got tanked by some DOPE (hint: it was meeeee) so you will have to take my word for it or go to Whitby on your own dime and while you're at it fly me back to Glasgow please.

This is the cliff where all the birds live in between Robin Hood's Bay and Whitby! They hang out all day long and swoop around and yell at each other like a bunch of idiots. Birds are filthy and generally unpleasant animals. Ugh. Birds.

In any case, I liked Whitby, but after a few days in various parts of Yorkshire, I was really ready to move on. I missed my friends a lot and the week was oddly balanced in a way that made it hard to fully unplug and relax but also made it hard to get work done on the dissertation. Both of those things would change in Scotland, which is coming up... sometime! Hooray!

BLAH BLAH MORE NATURE ON THE WALK BLAH BLAH. (Note: shortly after taking this photo, I walked by a field of sheep and suddenly realized "If you've hit the point where you're not excited by your walk through a field of sheep, it's definitely time to leave England." AND THE VERY NEXT DAY I DID.