Wales: Journey to the land of sheep and green countryside!!

Well this is my final post about my Europeans travels. I am officially settled in back on campus, and starting on a research project that I will be working on for the summer (A New Historicist approach to examining Iago and his art of rhetoric in Othello, in case you were going to ask). But here is the end bit of my final adventure across the Atlantic.

My friend Emma and I caught a train to Cardiff, Wales, at Paddington Station in London. After a fairly short train ride, we found ourselves wandering through downtown central Cardiff in the middle of the night. Some man's dog almost attacked me, but other than that the town was pretty calm and quiet. It also started raining, but luckily we found our hostel soon. The next day we just wandered around town and checked everything out. I think the main icon of Cardiff is the castle: Cardiff Castle. It used to be a Roman army camp back during the Roman occupation of Britain starting from 43 ad. Years later, when the Romans left, some Welsh kings or dukes (or something) built a castle on top of the ruins. The castle has a central Keep built on top of a mound for security. There were also buildings and stuff on the grounds, inside the castle walls. But the castle started to deteriorate over the years (and wars), until the 19th century when a local duke moved in. He was super rich from the Cardiff coal industry and decided to rebuild and redesign the castle. He had the walls redone, the garden re-landscaped, and the banquet hall/rooms redesigned. So what's left of the castle is basically all 19th century reconstructions, which were cool in their own right, but did not quite have the historic appeal of an original castle. You can see all my castle pictures with the link at the end.

We also went to the Cardiff Museum and wandered through the 'downtown' area. It really a small town, with lots of shops and restaurants and people. There is a university too (Cardiff University), and I think that it had a college-town feel. We also walked over the the bay, where there is a wharf/harbor-type set-up called Mermaid Bay (I think.. I know it had the word mermaid in it). For lunch I had my very first Welsh pasty - their famous food made of flakey bready material and stuffed with potato, meat, or whatever you decide to put in. It was very pretty on the bay too.

The next morning, we caught a train to Swansea, which is a few towns west of Cardiff. Swansea is also right on the coast, and only a few miles from Gower Peninsula, which was our final destination. The Gower Peninsula is known for some beautiful hikes and ruins and coastline. We made it to the start of a very nice coastal trail that followed the beach and the cliffs and then went through come of the quaint rolling countryside. We saw a tidepool, a cool bird, cows, sheep (lots!), angry dogs, a castle, and a shepherd on a 4-by-4 dirtbike. It was a cool day. We returned to Cardiff that night and decided that we had to experience a local pub. All around town, there are signs for "Brains Beer," which is apparently a local Cardiff beer of which the citizens are particularly proud. So we had one; it was ok, not the best beer but whatever.

The next morning we caught the train back to London, where I caught my bus back to Paris. The bus ride was interesting because we drove through some random English countryside and ended up at Dover - the taking-off point for the ferry across the English Channel. The bus drove onto a huge ferry along with tons of other cars. Once we were loaded in, all us passengers went up to the upper decks of the ferry where there were stores, restaurants, cafes, and even game rooms to entertain us during the 2-hour ferry ride. It was cool to cross the Channel the old-fashioned way. I suddenly remembered the part in A Tale of Two Cities where the girl is traveling from London to Paris on a ferry across the Channel (I think that's what happens, right? It's been a few years for me..). In the span of 4 days, I went from Cardiff to London to Paris (then back to London for my layover) to San Francisco to Los Angeles. It's been a weird couple of days, missing Paris and thinking about Britain but excited to be home in the US. It's certainly been an exciting, incredible, and inspiring semester. But it is nice that here in Los Angeles, I can get a cup of coffee for less than two dollars, rather than paying 4 euros in France. I do really hope I can go back soon. But for now, I'm enjoying sunny California.

You can see all of my Wales pictures here:

Wales: Cardiff and Swansea