Blue Jasmine

After running and cleaning, I had no programme for the day. However, there are still a few handy items I want to buy: things like a nail cutter, towel hooks, a bicycle map, a backpack that can hold my sports clothes. So in the afternoon I went to town (by way of the race track, see previous post) to see if I could learn to find my way there.

What I had not counted on was the crowds. Of course York attracts tourists - I have been one myself, in fact probably born-and-bred Yorkers would still regard me as one; but the streets were simply packed, to a degree where even a bike was pretty useless. A secondary effect is that the shops are themselves pretty useless, for someone not interested in touristy stuff. After crisscrossing several times I had only obtained two of the items I had come for, the map and the backpack, and I decided that was enough.

In the evening a melancholy feeling took hold of me, very different from the mood of the morning. I had decided to go and see another movie, in another cinema too, in fact I had decided in favour of Sunshine on Leith, the musical movie I mentioned in a previous post; but when looking up the programme I saw that the newest Woody Allan movie had come out, Blue Jasmine, with Galadriel (aka Cate Blanchett) in the lead, and the reviews convinced me that that had to take priority. An added bonus was that the cinema I had selected, City Screen Picturehouse, was showing this at 18:00, after which I thought I could still take a look around in town.

Well, Blue Jasmine is a great movie, but (as you might guess from the title) not one to lift clouds of melancholy: quite the opposite. Furthermore, when coming out of the cinema at 20:00 I discovered that, it being exactly one week after I had arrived, the same type of crowd that I had encountered in the train to York were now ruling the city. That did not fit my mood at all, so I took my bike and rode away into the night, back to the university.

But no, sitting alone in my room did not feel like a very attractive idea either. Maybe there would be some life on campus? I walked around for a bit, but it seems there is no Vestingbar equivalent here. So it was back to town, but staying away from the centre this time I found a local pub named after a Scottisch poem, which promised a "warm and friendly welcome": just the ticket!

Sitting below a screen showing a darts game, reading the latest Terry Pratchett and having a couple of pints did a lot to restore me (except that Strongbow tastes quite nasty, have to stay away from that in the future). When suddenly a live singer started performing Fleetwood Mac's "Seven Wonders" (which is of course the game I ended with last night) at exactly the moment I read that Miss Serendipity was undertaking a journey to York, I knew that I had come to the right place.