After my Aunt and Uncle came to see me last weekend, I thought I’d do a little bit of travelling myself. Usually, as many of you know, I’ll jump on a train to London, but this time I decided to go the other way, up to Durham to see my younger sister. She’s just started studying at the university, the clever girl, and since I haven’t been to Durham for years, I thought it’d be nice to go and pay a little visit while catching up and spending some long overdue sister-time together.
Clearly, the weather didn’t much agree. It chucked it down for the majority of the day, and my train was 55 minutes delayed getting there. Yay. But get there I did, and the joyful bundle that is my little sister greeted me at the station so we could go and explore Durham. After food. And seeing her college.
Durham really is a beautiful city. It’s full of amazing architecture, from the Norman Castle and Cathedral to a couple of discreet 20th century builds. Mostly though, you can see a lot of impressive stonework, and even though I don’t study architecture in any way at all, I can appreciate a beautiful building.
Since it’s now mid-November, buildings up and down the country are all trussed up with Christmas decorations, and city streets are getting ready for big Christmas lights ‘Switch on’. Walking along the cobbled streets doesn’t quite hold the intense winter magic that there would be if the lights were on already, but seeing the cute decorations is still a little bit spell binding.
It’s a very sleepy city, after the complete hectic nature of Seoul, my frequent trips to London, and Sheffield being none too quiet either, Durham provided a nice change of pace. For what it ‘lacks’ in things that make larger, chaotic cities so interesting to me, it makes up in charm and character. Also, the Cathedral was used to film parts of Harry Potter.
We ate lunch at my sisters college (Durham uni runs with the same collegiate system as Oxbridge), but for dinner we decided to eat out at a little Italian place called La Spaghettata, before watching a couple of episodes of ‘The Wrong Mans’ before I had to get my train back to Sheffield.
I really love places that are beautiful to photograph. One of the things on my bucket list is to ‘Visit Every City in England’.
Where do you want to travel most in the world? Or in England? I really want to go to Edinburgh next, but that might have to wait for a little while. What about you?
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