Sunday, October 08, 2006






My third weekend in the UK has flown by, just like the previous two. Time seems to be distorted here as the weekdays seem to take ages to go by, but weekends (as always) are gone in an instant. Mike came up this weekend from Birmingham. He caught the train up Friday evening.

We had a wonderful weekend exploring Cardiff. There are still many places here that I have yet to see, so this weekend we went to Cardiff Castle (big castle in the heart of the town.) On the way to the castle we quickly realized that there was some sort of sporting even going on in the city because of all the Welsh perephenlia beign sold on the street corners. It turned out that Wales was playing football at the Millenium stadium in the heart of the city. Thus there were many crowds of people, decked out in Welsh gear, heading towards the stadium and creating a general racchus.

The castle sight was first occupied by the Romans in circa 75 BC, then the normans came alone, and a long time afterwards the castle was owned by the owner of the factories of black gold. (i.e. coal). He was the richest man in the UK at the time. That man, had so many homes around the world, that he gave up the castle to the city of Cardiff. This is the only castle in the UK that is owned by the city, all the others are still privately owned. The history of the castle is really intriguing though. At one point, one prince was angry at another prince, crossed the English channel and collected his brother from Normandy, and returned to Cardiff to imprison him in a tower here at the castle! He was imprisoned for eight years when his death set him free. There are 100 rooms in the castle, and most of them have been restored to their former glory. One room is valued at 20 million pounds (the ceiling is covered in gold), another table in the dining room valued at 6 million pounds. (To get to USD multiply by 2). Additionally, the castle grounds itself are quite large and secured by a huge wall around the premises. Saturday flew by in Cardiff.






Sunday morning, Mike's mom, Pamela, came by to exchange my bike, spend the afternoon in Cardiff with us and to drive Mike back to Birmingham. We went to Cardiff bay, which is the location of where the old docks used to be that shipped out all the coal that was produced in Wales. After the coal rush died down, the docks turned into a ghost town, but now they are pumping money back into that part of town and revamping it. The architecture of the buildings along the bay are incredible. Very modern but really unique designs. We walked into the parliament building, a historical church, and the opera house. There are tours given in all of these buildings, but unfortunately we didn't have time for any of this. We grabbed a traditional English lunch (what is known as dinner here) at a pub. A traditional English dinner includes roast beef, roast potatoes, pees, carrots, a muffin/bread like thing and ofcoarse, everything covered in gravy. 'Fat free' are words problably not known around here. At the end of the afternoon, Mike and Pam set off to Birmingham and the weekend is over.

I've got class from 10 to 2pm straight tomororw, then a two hour break (break=library time) and then a modern british economic history course. The week is going to be very full, but i'm looking forward to sailing wednesday afternoon.

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