Scott in London
Journal #1

October 8, 2003
I have just recently arrived from my "holiday" (that's what they call it here) in Wales, and I think I need another week to recuperate. The house shut down last Saturday and we were supposed to travel throughout the U.K. and experience another culture. Until three days before we left I still hadn't made any plans, so I wound up going with this guy (Steve
from Maine) who wanted to see some castles.

We took a bus to Cardiff, the largest city and capital of Wales, which was our home base for the first half of the trip. Cardiff is a modern city with the full range of theatres, museums, and even a university, but it is criticized as being very un-Welsh. It is a modern city with very little in the way of history. But we didn't really spend any time there
anyway.

We spent all of our time on little excursions into the surrounding area via the Welsh public transportation system. To their credit, they will take you where you want to go...eventually. Some buses only run three or four times per day and usually no buses run on Sundays, which can leave you quite stranded. They don't go directly anywhere either, except back
to London. Once we spent an hour and 45 minutes on two different buses to reach a town fifteen miles away. However, the little towns were well worth the trip. We went to see castles in Cardiff, Chepstow, Caerphilly (the single most impressive structure I have ever seen), and Raglan.

We spent three nights in Cardiff before moving down the road to Swansea, an older, historically-rich Welsh port city. Steve made me go with him
to a museum devoted to the poet Dylan Thomas (Swansea was his hometown) and we spent time walking on cliffs on the Gower Peninsula, supposedly
one of the most beautiful places in Wales. It totally lived up to my expectations. Swansea is a bastion of Welsh culture. It was the first place where we heard Welsh spoken by random people on the street. The language of the locals has found a sort of rebirth in certain areas of Wales after centuries of suppression by their English lords. We learned
a little bit of Welsh ourselves as well.

After two nights in Swansea we took a train up to Bangor on the north coast of Wales. It is supposedly the largest city on the north coast,
but they must use that term loosely because it was smaller than Kerrville. We could stand on a hill and see across the town. But it was a university town and one out of three people there are students. Bangor is a tiny town nestled between high mountains and the coast. The mountains around Bangor were one of the last refuges of the druids when they were being suppressed by the Saxons, and then were the last stronghold of the Welsh kings before they were subdued by the English.
We spent two days traveling through the mountains to little towns like Llanberis, and saw two of the great English castles: Caernarfon and Conwy. We spent two nights in Bangor and then took a train back to London.

As much fun as I had, it is really good to be back in the city. There is this certain something about the awesome power of London that I really started to miss (it was probably the car exhaust). A few weeks ago I remarked to my mom that since I have always lived in the country I had never really appreciated nature, but once my grass and trees were
replaced with concrete and bricks, all I wanted to do was to go to a park. This week I got my nature fix. I finally saw animals other than
pigeons and went to places where I couldn't hear cars. It is amazing how I am now by the little things in life.

Cheers.
SCOTT