I've done quite a few visiting-Cardiff-as-a-tourist posts at this point so I hesitated to do another one. But since this time I had a couple of excursions to some different places and there are some nice photos... eh, what the hell.
This time I went back via Stansted, which involved 6 (or possibly more like 7) hours on a bus. The bus is very cheap but I think next time it might be worth the extra expense of the train. The first leg spent an age grinding through the gridlocked London traffic, taking a full 30 minutes to get round a single interchange. The driver's continuous insistence on sharp accelerations and decelerations didn't help.
Naturally this meant I arrived at the London coach station the exact moment my next bus was leaving. I'd booked a flexible ticket, but I had a full hour to kill. For sheer want of anything better to do I decided to check in with the office in case I needed to rebook the ticket. This was fortunate because I did, and nominally there should have been a fee for this, but the very nice lady wrote me a note saying it wasn't my fault and pretty please would the driver let me on the next bus. Warning me that the bus drivers could be very grumpy about such things, I was pleasantly surprised that the guy was not actually an ogre who wanted to club me and eat my bones, but a very nice chap who simply waved me aboard no questions asked.
In Cardiff it was, happily, raining. October is supposed to be dark and rainy, dammit. Bright sunshine would just be wrong. Even more fortunately, it would rain for only two days that I was there : when I arrived and when I left.
The next day I began doing the stuff I could do in Prague but just don't want to. I got some new glasses, a haircut, applied for a replacement debit card, went into Waterstones... that sort of thing. Also I was introduced to McVitie's Digestives Gold, which are incredibly dangerous biscuits. I ate several metric tonnes of actual food as well and regretted absolutely nothing.
On the weekend we went on a little day trip to Swansea to walk down the beach. The train ride featured a report of someone walking along the tracks but either we ran over the silly twat or he was never really there. I guess I'll never know. Worse was the extremely loud, dishevelled drunk guy shouting "tickets please !" as he walked to his seat because some people are just like that. The rest of his group seemed... less obnoxious but this one dude was awful. To the Asian gentlemen opposite us he said, "sorry I don't speak Japanese !". He spent the rest of the trip loudly ranting about nothing in particular and talking to the teenage girls opposite. It was creepy and weird.
Once you get through Swansea town things get much better. I haven't been there since a high school trip right before starting university, and the beach is as shamefully under-utilised as I remember. Miles and miles of sand just left to do absolutely nothing.
We walked right down the length of the beach, which would end up as a total of a 12 mile round trip (add on at least one more for me because I'd walked the dog earlier in the morning as well). At the Mermaid café right before you reach the Mumbles I ate yet another quite astonishingly large meal of what was very possibly the best panini I've ever had. That steak ! Good lord... and the truffle chips, proper British chip shop chips but heavily seasoned with truffle. When they asked if they wanted desert it was all I could do to blurt out "NO !" to prevent myself from exploding. It would have been like Mr Creosote.
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| One of those cases where you look at it and think "that doesn't look like it's nearly enough", realise the bread is actually enfolded spacetime and what appeared to be a few small pieces of steak is actually a sizeable chunk of a cow. |
A few hundred metres more brought us to the end of the bay and the Mumbles themselves. What are Mumbles ? Nothing like wombles, that's for sure. No, apparently they were named by desperate sailors who thought they looked like boobies (no, not the seabirds). Walking along the seafront this made not a lick of sense because the cliffs are all perfectly normal-looking flat rocks, and not even the randiest, most sexually deprived sailor in history is ever going to mistake a cliff for something he could sodomise or otherwise generally fornicate with. Then you get to the Mumbles and think... aahhh, now it makes sense. Well, more so than the Grand Tetons, at any rate.
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| I suppose you have to admit they are very big and firm. |
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| Presumably this is warning people against damaging the underwater archaeology (whatever that might be), but I prefer to think it's because the archaeology is itself very dangerous. |
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| Thankfully we made it back to Swansea before nightfall and didn't encounter any more drunken louts. |
The next adventure was a trip to Castell Coch, the Marquess of Bute's second home (or nth home at any rate). Much like his main residence in Cardiff (Cardiff Castle), this little folly is an ornate fantasy playground. And also much like Cardiff Castle, this is somewhere I haven't visited since school. It certainly seemed a lot bigger back then.
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| One of the towers is currently under repair. Sadly some of the ornate paintwork inside has suffered extensive water damage, though a restoration project is underway. |
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| It's good to be the Marquess. |
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| One nice feature is the handheld point-and-click audioguides they give you, which don't require those annoying headphones. They have a speaker that's loud enough to hear if you hold it close, without distracting everyone else. |
Shout-out to the tiny Forest Fawr café, which is actually mainly a fireplace seller of all things, but is absolutely lovely inside and does top-notch greasy spoon toasties etc. Unexpectedly good for somewhere well out of the way !
Other exploits included a trip down the bay and repeatedly walking the dog in my more usual haunts.
And last but not least, my second-ever experience of a live rugby match. The Cardiff Arms Park is like the Millennium Stadium's misbegotten child (or possibly, more accurately, its wizened grandparent), lurking in the shadow of its much larger relative. But rugby is rugby, and unlike football, the number of points scored is somewhere in the low thousands per match, so at least there's actual stuff happening to watch.
And then I went from one home to another back to Prague. Not for long though, because I'm typing this up at the tail-end of a conference in Granada. More on that one next time.
