Day 6: (Not New) York City

17 January 2018

Today was a continuation of our adventures in the city of York. Because the bus was not allowed in the city, we had to walk on foot. We first walked to York Minister, the largest medieval cathedral in Northern Europe. This was definitely my favorite cathedral visit so far because there were so many nifty facts and cool things to learn about the building and refurbishing of the cathedral. First, we learned that the building began construction in 627 and completed 250 years later! Second, we learned that it took up to 10 years for them to refurbish and clean one of the stained glass windows, and today was the first day that the window was in public view since 2008! One of the more annoying facts was that the cathedral is not centered in places; for example, the Rose Window was not centered with the doors, as pictured below.










We then walked over to York Central Methodist Church where we rehearsed for our first full-length concert of the trip. We sang every song in our repertoire, which included secular favorites like “Loch Lomond” and “Love Psalm” and church songs such as “The 23rd Psalm” and “If Ye Love Me.” The audience members were all older and there were only about 15-20 of them. The church was set up so that the pews took up most of the church space other than the altar that we performed in front of. 

This concert was special because it was the first time we performed a full set abroad since the last choir trip to Turkey and Greece; I was not an R-MC student at that time, so this was my first time singing a full set abroad. I thought that we did a decent job and even though the audience was small, they seemed to really enjoy the concert. I even saw someone mouthing the words to “If Ye Love Me!” 

My favorite part of the concert was when we sang “The 23rd Psalm.” This song has always been one of my favorites from the fall semester, but hearing it sung in the church with the acoustics made me get chills throughout the song, especially towards the end. Another favorite part was “Come Trav’ler, Haste Away” because I was able to reach some of those higher alto notes within the melody; now that I think about it, I’m not sure if this is a good thing or a bad thing! 



After our concert, we had some free time, and the group I was with decided to go to Five Guys. I only mention this because it was interesting to see how they immersed American culture in the middle of one of the busiest cities in England; even though fries are called chips in the UK, they kept the American name in this restaurant.

The end of lunch brought us to the York Museum Gardens and the ruins of St. Mary’s Abbey. We were here for a pretty short time, but I took some great pictures of the ruins and the cemetery. St. Mary’s Abbey was ruined as part of the protests against the monarchies during the Reformation.







We travel to Oxford tomorrow! 

- Jacob Stech

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Day 12: Dining Fancy at Cambridge

Image
23 January 2018 Today was a very eventful day...well, at least the latter half was. We had a very long drive to Cambridge from Bristol that took even longer than planned because of traffic issues. Yep, there’s no possible way to escape traffic, even if you’re in a different country.  Once we arrived in Cambridge, we stopped at Kings College. We took a self-guided tour of the chapel and saw many of the same things that we would see at other famous churches, including the architecture. This chapel is notable because Henry VI founded the College in which the chapel is located in. After this tour, we had some free time and we decided to visit a music store which took quite a while to find. We saw many awesome things including a £13,000 grand piano!  Our next stop was Selwyn College. We changed into part of our choir robes and were ready to rehearse with the Selwyn College Chapel Choir led by Sarah MacDonald, a very notable woman in English music, which our pre...
Read more

Day 13: Concert at Ely Cathedral

Image
24 January 2018 We all woke up at six in the morning after a late night at Selwyn College, and we were on our way to St. John’s College to see one of the best choirs in England rehearse—or so we thought. Unfortunately, traffic made us late for our visit and we had to scrap the visit entirely. On a lighter note, our first actual stop of the day was Ely Cathedral. We looked around for a little and then we headed out to explore the city of Ely. A few of us decided to eat at a small diner in which we had a good second breakfast! After walking around Ely and getting caught in a rainstorm on the way back, we fried off and prepared for our concert.  For this concert, we sang in Ely Cathedral’s Lady Chapel, which was a large room with amazing acoustics. Because of the acoustics, we had to take our time, sing slowly, and enjoy the massive echo that occurred after each note. We sang our entire repertoire minus “Make A Joyful Noise” due to the lack of a large organ. We d...
Read more

Day 14: Windsor Castle and Royal Holloway College

Image
25 January 2018 Our day begin with a trip to Windsor Castle! This is one of the official residences of the British monarch and it has many features, including the state apartments, Mary’s Dolls House, and St. George’s Chapel. While I could not take any pictures inside these attractions, I can say that it is hard to come up with words to describe the fancy living in the state apartments and the amount of gold that was everywhere. While the Dolls House was a little more underwhelming considering I just witnessed the most amount of fanciness in one building ever, it was still cool to see a monarch’s doll collection and to know her husband’s dedication to building the giant house for her dolls. Lastly, St. George’s Chapel was like most of the other chapels I had visited, but it was cool to know that many kings and queens were buried in this building along with Henry VIII, a king that has been a prominent figure in the religious studies portion of our course.  ...
Read more