Hello, I am Julia and I am from Ascheberg, a small village near Münster, Germany. My first stay in York was for two weeks in November 2017.
I visited York with a group of twelve people. We all work for the City Council of Münster. We started our trip at the main station in Münster and got on a train to Düsseldorf airport. We got a flight to Manchester and travelled to York by train. When we arrived in York we were all picked up by our host families who gave us a home for the next two weeks.
On our first weekend we did a guided tour through the city and learned interesting facts about the history of York. I really like the medieval heart of the city with its old city walls and small streets with lots of shops, restaurants, pubs and tea rooms. The most impressive building is the gothic Minster.
During our first week we learned English in groups of six people at York Associates. The school is a nice old building near the city centre. We discussed interesting topics, did some grammar tasks and learned new writing skills. One evening we did a tour with our teacher from York Associates to some small pubs and listened to live music.
In the second week our group did a job-shadowing. Everybody worked for an English company for example Portakabin or the City Council of York. I worked for Explore York. The Library and Archive is situated near the city centre and the Museums Gardens. I helped them doing social media work and searched the Archive for interesting items to show in an exhibition. Furthermore I worked for a project called "Past Caring - Conservation Live". We sat at a desk in the library and gave a demo of how to conserve old papers and we invited the visitors to get in touch with the archivists' work. This week was a good experience and I got an impression of an English working week.
I enjoyed walking along the river Ouse and the city walls or listening to a choir on Evensong in the Minster. The best place for having lunch is Shambles Market. You can get a great variety of street food and can buy sweets and handmake chocolate in one of the small shops. When you want to have a cup of tea you can go to Betty's Tea Room which is very famous in York but you often have to wait in a long queue to get in.
