Wednesday, February 6th: Cardiff

So last Wednesday, I went to Cardiff for the day. I just went by myself, as a day-trip, so - yeah! I just took a train and a tuna sandwich and wandered around Wales for a day. Nobody stamped my passport, which was a little sad, but I guess there's always Ireland. :)

When I first got off the train, I got really excited about how all the signs were in Welsh as well as English, which is why there are a lot of pictures of panels at the bottom of monuments and street signs and things. I asked around and found a bus that would take me to Cardiff Bay, where the Millenium Centre is (buses in Wales are so easy! all you have to do is give them a pound and you can go anywhere in the zone of your choice! which in my case was all of Cardiff, so it worked out). This being my First Major Trip Anywhere By Myself, not counting dragging suitcases through Heathrow to get here in the first place, I was a little nervous, but people were seriously really helpful. And after a couple hours of wandering around the Bay, I felt more comfortable with getting around. It was a really gorgeous day, so I didn't have to worry about being cold, and there were ducks and swans and seagulls out at the Bay and little Welsh kids on school trips running around the different monuments and "places of interest," as my map says. And I'm glad I went to the Bay first, because I felt a little bit of familiarity being on docks with boats and stuff, I guess because of the Marina.

So I wandered around the Bay until I found the Roald Dahl Plas, which is that immense open area with poles circling it and a monolith and the Millenium Centre at one end. (I'm sure the monolith has a name, I just don't know it. It's the thing from Torchwood.) It's seriously huge - like, not the space itself, but the monolith goes on for nine years and I couldn't even get the giant brass facade-thing of the Millenium Centre into one picture. It's a very cool area. You can walk right up and touch the monolith - it's got water pouring down every side, so it's like a very contained fountain, except when the wind blows and then people get sprayed with water droplets.

After an hour or so of taking pictures and walking around and going, Doctor Who filmed here! it occured to me to look for a visitor's center, which is that weird oblong tube building in the pictures. They didn't sell anything in there but Doctor Who merchandise, which I found hilarious. I mean - it's a whole city! But I guess people only come in there looking for Doctor Who shooting locations (kinda like me... sigh). One of the pamphlets they gave me was a map of all the public art exhibitions in the Bay, so I followed that around and took pictures of all the sculptures and things. I also went inside the Welsh Parliament building, which was pretty cool - they made me put my things in a bin and go through security, like an airport, and then they were pretty much like, have fun! You can sit in at a session if you want! But I felt kind of uncomfortable just going into a session chamber, like, "Hey guys, whatcha doing? Making laws?" So I just took some pictures inside the building and then left.

This very nice elderly couple took my picture in front of a "Welcome to Cardiff Bay!" sign in Welsh. They asked me if I knew what it meant, and I said welcome to Cardiff, and they said, "That's right! Very good!" And I had to say, "No, I mean, it's on the other side in English!" They laughed. When they heard my American accent they started telling me about how they had been to San Fransisco and how they liked America. Everybody was really nice like that - I met another elderly couple on the other side of the Bay who were taking a day trip from Caerphilly, where they lived. They picked me out as a tourist and asked how my day was going, took pictures for me with the Bay behind me, recommended places in Spain for me to vacation, and tried to set me up with their doctor son. And another time lady walked by with a pretty dog, and when I commented on him she said, "Well thank you! Are you enjoying your trip to Cardiff?" And I said "Yes!" and I was just so happy that everybody was all friendly and interested in my day. Yay!

I ate lunch by the monolith thing, my tuna sandwich and a Welsh water bottle, so almost free, and then I walked across the street to the Red Dragon Centre, where I had read on my tourist map that there was a Doctor Who exhibit. I wasn't going to go in, because I knew I'd be coming back to Cardiff with Anna Snyder or Morgan and Dad, and we'd probably do it then, but when I saw the awesome setup I really just couldn't resist. It's pretty much worth doing twice, in any case. That's what I'm telling myself. :) They gave me a Doctor Who quiz to fill out as I went along, and not only did I get all of the questions right, I filled out a bunch of them without any help from the exhibit. :D There was all this stuff!! I took a million pictures. Also the gift shop had Doctor Who novels that are out of print in the U.S., and everything was just really exciting. And everybody knew about Doctor Who! Which, I mean, I was at an exhibit, but it was really weird to have normal people just come out of the exhibit and say stuff like, "You'll really want to go in there. That Doctor, always getting into trouble!" They know all about him over here. Very weird.

After milling around the exhibit with a huge smile on my face for an hour, I took a bus to the Cardiff Castle and signed up for a tour of the Victorian part of the castle. So, let me preface this with: Cardiff Castle is awesome. Its foundations are an old Roman fortification, which was adapted into a Norman fortress during the Norman invasion, and then in the Victorian era, it was inherited by a rich Welsh family who added their own idealized "medieval" castle area for vacations. The Victorian part is really the only part you can go inside, besides the Norman castle keep which is just a four or five story prison thing in the middle of the grounds. I may be wrong, but I think that King Richard and Prince John's illegitimate half-brother was kept there until he died. Anyway.

The Victorian castle was made up of a series of themed rooms, like the Arab Room, which had incense and Byzantine designs on the ceiling and floor, and a medieval feasting hall with ancient kings painted everywhere and carved into wood. Incidentally, that's where world leaders are entertained when they come to Cardiff, still. A month or so before I visited, Prince Charles apparently had lunch there. Every room was incredibly richly made up. Our tour guide kept saying things like, there are six kinds of marble in this room, this mahogany is painted with real gold, there are emeralds set into the eyes of the saints, it would cost 25 million pounds to recreate this room in full. It was completely crazy. We weren't allowed to take pictures indoors, or I so would have.

After the tour I just wandered around the castle grounds, which were beautiful and expansively green even though the castle is smack in the middle of city. I went up into the keep, all these teetering narrow stairs, and looked out over the city from the top of it. It felt so, so cool. It really is a medieval castle the way we think of it. I wanted to wear a pretty dress and read Chaucer, or something.

I'd just about crunched my time with the tour, so I hightailed it back to the train station, which was walking distance, and got on my bus with five minutes to spare. And then it brought me back to Bath, and I was home in time for dinner! (It is our routine in Linley, almost every day, for a small group of girls to make dinner for the whole house, while another group does dishes after. It's very homey and nice, and we get good food and bonding time out of it. Yay!) It was an awesome, awesome trip. It was really relaxing to just wander around and look at art and buildings and just take things in. I want to go back!