I've always wanted to go to Toronto's craft extravaganza, the One-of-a-Kind Show, so when I saw advertisements for the "traditional" St. Nicholas Fayre in York, with "some of the finest crafts in England" I bought the hype and bought the train tickets. Mike and I took the day off, got up early and spent 2 1/2 hours getting down there only to find a lovely old town completely over-run by chain stores, English bargain hunters, and stalls full of crap. There were maybe 3 stalls in the whole town that actually sold products that had been hand-crafted in the U.K. As Mike said, it was like the dollar store had over run the entire town. So don't believe the hype. The St. Nicholas Fayre is not worth the trip.
The Barley Hall, a lovely restored medieval building, had a few interesting medieval stalls inside. I had some recreation viking mead there, and learned about Norwegian nalbinding. Abbeyhorn, a company that's been going since the 18th century, had a stall selling various goods they'd manufactured out of Highland cow horns. There were also some genuine medieval Lord of the Rings Action Figures, not to mention a few reproduction fairies.
Since we quickly tired of the whole shopping thing, we decided to check out the viking exhibit, Jorvik, and the archeaology exhibit, The Dig. The city of York takes its name from the Viking settlement that was there during the dark ages. Because York is peaty, artifacts have been well preserved in its soil. The Jorvik visitor centre is set up at the site where some 40,000 human artifacts from the Viking age were discovered. I found the exhibit a little too amusement parkish (you get into a wee car thingee with surround sound and are shuttled through a recreation of the village), but at least it has some educational value and did get the mind working, more than can be said for the shopping.
The Dig was the highlight of the day for me. If anyone's been to Science North in Sudbury--one of my favourite places--imagine a similar approach to archaeology. For 5 pounds per adult, you get a one hour tour of the exhibit with an archaeologist. You get to dig for artifacts, sort bits of bone from bits of pottery and handle real fossilized viking poo. Now that was fun.
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Hee. I actually hate European Christmas markets because they PRETEND it's all about handcrafted thingamees, but they really want to sell you the same junk you could buy anywhere, plus there are 80 million people all trying to buy the same crap. I think the fact that they advertised it as a "Fayre" should have tipped you off... Anything that twee has to be regarded with suspicion!
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