Meandering in Malta

Yes, another travel post... well gosh, I have been busy, haven't I ?

Yes, yes I have. And I'm very glad to have an entire month of staying put before I need to go anywhere else again. I actually quite like being in different places, I just hate going between them. Especially on this particular trip, where out of the total of 10 days away, three of those had 10-12 hours of travelling apiece. That's a bit much for my liking.

Anyway, at the end of the last post I was just about to embark to Malta. This was an uneventful but boring trip : 6am start for the taxi to the bus stop, two hours on a bus (quiet a scenic route in daylight, lots of barren rocky mountains), two hours in the airport, couple of hours or so flight to Rome, 2.5 hours layover, 1.5 hours or so to Malta, half hour taxi to the apartment. It was indeed a full 12 hours of just moving from place to place interspersed with long bouts of absolute nothingness.

Worth it ? Yeah, I'd say so. First because the conference (and it was a proper conference this time) was useful, but also because Malta is a fascinating place with history in every step. I'd definitely come back.

 

Melting in Malta

Why Malta ? The "Astronomical Data Analysis Software & Systems" conference was recommended to me at last year's All Hands (the same meeting as in Granada this year). Everyone there really seemed to like my code – though predictably I had exactly no feedback on it in the intervening year – and someone suggested ADASS would be a good venue to promote it to a wider audience.

This year's event, the 34th in the series, was hosted by the University of Malta. I'd booked my trip for the day after the All Hands, figuring it would be better to have a spare day somewhere I'd never been before. A wise decision. I should also mention (and I swear nobody's sponsoring me for this) that this included a free taxi from booking.com (with whom I found accommodation) to the apartment. That's undoubtedly the most useful free perk a travel site has ever offered me. Especially since the taxi driver was good enough to give me details for booking the return trip.

Both Granada and Malta were about the same temperature, roughly 10-20 C, slightly warmer but much, much more humid in Malta. The ADASS website says, "the weather in Malta is usually cold and wet at this time of year. Warm jackets and umbrellas are recommended" which is plainly ludicrous. Everyone was dressed for summer, and rightly so because wearing a "warm jacket" would have been like wearing a sign which said, "please hurt me". Umbrellas would be helpful : one day it did nothing but rain, and the rest of the time there were occasional light showers. I managed just fine with my light summer rain jacket. On occasion I even needed a jumper.

I arrived in my apartment at about 7pm, when it was already dark. This turned out to be thoroughly deserving of its 7.3 rating on booking.com. Basic, to be sure, but in an absolutely first-rate location. 10 minutes walk (or less) from the tourist centre with, thank goodness, not a single intimidating street gang in sight (unlike Padova). In fact it was right next to St Elmo's fort. The area itself was largely quiet. Inside it was certainly... standard, and things could do with some plastering and a lick of paint, especially the stairs; the instruction not to wear shoes inside was very much a case of shutting the door after the horse has bolted. But the most important things were all perfectly fine. The bed was comfy, the fridge and microwave worked, the shower was surprisingly good (if small), there was a kettle and... a huge supply of Tetley tea. I'd go there again.

Basic, to be sure, but quite comfortable all the same.

The ceiling beams would however make this unsuitable for anyone taller than 5'10" or so. I'm short enough that this wasn't a problem for me, though I did have to stoop a little in the shower. The air conditioning was very effective though, not needed so much for the temperature as the humidity.

Mind you, I do sympathise with people complaining it wasn't suitable for its advertised maximum of 4 people, though it does clearly specify it has one double bed and one bedroom. Unless you're really, worryingly close with some very good friends, three would be silly, and four would be an absurd joke.

I had that first evening and the next day to explore my surroundings. One of the first things I was struck by was just how very, very British Malta feels. This was my first time in which I got to use my UK adaptor outside of the UK. But there are a lot more vestiges of British rule all over the place : phone boxes, post boxes, pedestrian crossing buttons, shops (Accessorize, M&S, Spar – among others), even a Cardiff Snack Bar (!)  that I saw from the taxi on the way back. Tourists too seem to be predominantly British. Even the scattered rain showers feel familiar.

From the Spar I bought Ribena, and felt like I'd come home.

Yet in every other respect it's blindingly obvious that this is worlds away from Britain. The streets are lined with palm trees and cactus. The November sun is still powerful enough that anything more than a T-shirt is usually unnecessary, sometimes even silly. Maltese is heard everywhere. And of course the architecture is altogether different. I have to say that many streets look run-down, almost dilapidated, but they are very much actively used and lived-in; a little bit of a culture-shock there. The posher places are very much cheek-by-jowl with those operating on a lower budget, and from the exterior they're not always easy to tell apart.

By the standards of Valletta this is a very wide and well-kept street.

My main bit of non-science excursion was to indulge my favourite tourist pastime of wandering aimlessly. Around Valletta this is an excellent strategy. As a capital city this is absolutely miniscule but very dense, with history in every step, and you can't fail to find something worth viewing everywhere you go. Doing a pre-planned route would be both boring and unnecessary. 

The narrow streets make finding somewhere to take a good overview photo difficult. This was about as good as I could manage. They need a few tall towers like Bologna !

The maximum elevation may only be 250m or so but the streets are very hilly. You get a lot of exercise walking around Malta.

The weather was... sometimes like this, sometimes bright sunshine. But I wouldn't want to come back in summer when it's 40 C.

The only "planned" activity I did was St Elmo's Fort, which was right next to my apartment so I could hardly avoid it. In fact I went twice. The first time I spent a good couple of hours walking around the whole fort, reading the signs and going through the series of really very good exhibits which cover the entire history of the island : from prehistory and classical antiquity to the Great Siege (1565) and WWII. I can summarise it all very simply. Malta has seen some serious shit. At one point it was reckoned among the most bombed places on Earth. But it's still here, the hulking fortresses of the knight's era still indomitable edifices of stone with walls that must be 20m thick. It is, in short, well worth visiting.

What exactly this is, if it's even part of the fort itself or technically outside it, I'm not sure.

The second time was the day after. As it happened the 10th November was the day the fort was opened for free with a military parade by the In Guardia re-enactment society, who do a parade of the knights of St John (being also Remembrance Sunday, this was preceded by a short memorial service of five soldiers which is basically identical to British remembrance practises). For a tiny local group they did an excellent job, and the acoustics of the fort made the muskets sound more like cannons. Incidentally, I also saw the 4pm ceremonial firing of a cannon from the Saluting Battery, so I have a good point of comparison.

The battery is about 15 minutes from the fort. You can pay a tiny fee to be on the platform when they fire the cannon, but I watched from the balcony like a cheapskate.

The Conferencing

This was my first ADASS so I didn't really know what to expect. Nobody made the obvious BADASS pun; perhaps that joke has long since run its course. I knew only three or four other people present but this does force one to mingle... which began almost instantly. The first day was a half-day session of tutorials. The first I simply watched along with, but the second was on user experience (UX). More on this in a moment, but the tutorial divided us all into random groups of six with the task being to design an app. The goal of this was not to make something functional but just to experience the design process as guided by a professional. 

A professional designer in astronomy ? Indeed. The ASTRON group in the Netherlands make so much software that they've hired a full-time UX designer who ran this course. The instructions filled me with dread : create a persona for people who will use your tool, write a story about how they'd use it... lordy, that sounds like corporate nonsense. Luckily for me, our group alone decided to have some fun with this. We decided to make an app to alter users of potential meteorite strikes. Our user persona was called Harald and he had a beloved cat (Whiskers) and a herd of cows. He was paranoid about meteorite strikes and his favourite activity was "not being hit on the head by meteorites". We even produced a visual of what the app ("Don't Look Up*") would look like, with a little warning message about the likely chance of a strike and options to get more details.

* Tagline, "Look At The App". 

Now, all of this is something one could do oneself without any guidance whatever. What I found the process did, however, was massively speed everything up. By delegating roles (though not very strictly) to each of the team members, everyone thinks through the process according to different perspectives. Consequently the creative juices really start flowing very quickly. How much warning does Harald need ? How does he want to receive alerts ? Does he want it to run in the background ? Do we need an Enterprise Edition that could provide warnings for multiple sites ? And so on.

The rest of the conference followed a more traditional structure. Normally conferences are subject-orientated, but this one is selected based on software. This is interesting because it brings together a much wider pool of expertise, with many people from software backgrounds who aren't professional astronomers at all. It makes the tea breaks an interesting experience, but the talks also are a lucky dip. Some were incredibly technical, more like computer science than astronomy*, others were about the history of project development, while a good chunk were on topics regular science conferences would normally consider too "soft".

* To the poor sod giving the talk about field gate programmable arrays, man, I have no idea what you were talking about, but bloody hell it sounded intelligent.

I'm going to limit myself here to the latter. There was a great deal of discussion about UX, which is about more than the software interface and actually even higher-level than that : how do users really use the software ? As various presenters said, traditionally astronomers aren't good at that. We write code that gets the right answer, but we don't do the (considerably easier) task of bothering to provide them a useful, intuitive interface. And we really should, because a bad interface means mistakes and the very inaccuracies we wanted to avoid ! Everyone likes the technical aspects and tries to avoid the social. But we shouldn't : these soft aspects can have hard results.

I have to also add that there remains an attitude in some quarters that our codes should be difficult to use, that they should only be accessible to an elite. This was firmly rejected here, with the overwhelming mood being to encourage everyone to actually think about interface design and take it seriously. No, it's not magnetohydronamics, but it's still important. I particularly liked the argument that we should presume users have the ability to understand the tool and it's only bad design which prevents them : the analogy made was that wheelchair users are only "disabled" when you don't provide them with lifts. 

As for my talk, I'm pleased to say that everyone really liked it. "I wish I'd thought of that", "I never would have thought of doing it that way" and even "Brilliant !" and "I wish I had that when I did cell biology" were mentioned. I was pleased as punch. There was even a question from the organisers afterwards as to whether we could organise ADASS in Prague. Well, I hope so. Next year it's in Germany which is much easier to get to than Malta so I'll probably try and go along; it was a welcoming affair and an interesting experience. In any case, it's clear that I need to keep promoting my code and that yes, other people want this to exist.

It was quite a large conference, with ~270 in-person attendees and another 60 or so online.

I'll close the science section with a sting in the tail. There were several nice history talks, including one on a 20-year project to digitise the entire collection of 500,000 photographic plates in Harvard. But there was also a warning. The incredibly popular DS9 software, which gets ~40,000 downloads per year, is in serious danger of running out of funding. This to me is almost literally unbelievable; it's such an indispensable tool that I just don't understand how any manager could be so ludicrously blind as to not see how its ~1 FTE requirement hasn't given back that investment a thousandfold and more over the years. Cancelling DS9 ? Have you gone completely mad ?

Ah well, a warning to us all. Anyway, the only conference socials were the welcome reception in which I managed to survive a ferocious onslaught of free wine, and a walking tour of Valletta. This helped put things in a bit more context. The guide was good, but a bit more "I've done this ten thousand times before" than the Alhambra guide. I asked her what the Maltese thought of the British when they decided for independence : was it a case of "get the hell out ?" or "we don't hate you, but please just leave". She said the latter. Which is as good as a colonial power can hope for, really.

I really liked the Tritons fountain. The way the water cascades in a shower from underneath the bowl, rather than just flowing over the edge, was somehow quite fascinating.

She also had quite an unusual take on the Great Siege. In Fort St Elmo this is portrayed as it usually is, as a heroic victory against the odds, a huge turning-point in the war between the Ottoman Turks and European Christendom. The guide, however, thought it wasn't anything in particular to celebrate, but more just pure luck : the Turks left because they were tired and wanted to go home and were worried by rumours of Christian reinforcements, rather than actually being beaten by the knights. Yet the exhibits at the fort portrayed this as a result of clever trickery in which the rumours were deliberately engineered by the knights.

Personally, for whatever it's worth, I stick with the classical view. Look, if you can hold out for so long against your enemy that they refuse to fight you anymore, if they'd rather turn tail instead of offering battle, then you've won.  It doesn't matter if this is because you actually beat them to a bloody pulp or convinced them through trickery that you could beat them to a pulp if they were foolish enough not to run away.  How you achieve victory has no bearing whatever on whether you have achieved victory. In that respect, the only thing that matter is that the enemy stop fighting. And I doubt there's a general in the world who'd disagree. 

And besides, for the massively-outnumbered knights to take out a third of the invasion force for the cost of one single fort is nothing to be sniffed at by anyone's standards.

All this being done, I went home. More conversations followed at the airport with other conference escapees who were, I'm delighted to say, enthusiastic about my presentation. Which is encouraging. Even DS9 took years to get any attention, but now practically everyone uses it : as an easy-to-use tool for quick inspection, it's second to none, and does a lot more besides. Of course the warning is that even that level of superlative success doesn't necessarily bring any benefits with it.

The return trip was just as long and uneventful as all the rest. Malta airport security have an everything scanner so that took all of five minutes. It's annoyingly busy inside (not much bigger than Cardiff despite being a popular tourist destination) but not awful. Zurich (shown below), where I had a four hour layover, is really very good indeed : absolutely massive, but with plenty of places to sit and charging points galore. Overpriced to be sure (I spent 18 EUR on Burger King because it was the cheapest option) but at least you can easily find a quiet place to sit. And so, feeling like I'd been gone for a full month rather than a mere ten days, back I went to Prague.

Galivanting in Granada

Two travel posts in a row ! Busy, busy...

Busy indeed. Immediately on returning from Cardiff my entire time was taken up for the next fortnight or so with admin duties. My Master's student has successfully transmuted into a PhD student (hooray !) which requires not only a bunch of direct logistics (where shall be his office ? whence his key ?) but also grant applications. And for myself, it became extremely urgent to actually book my next trip, a back-to-back conference jaunt. Which I managed, thankfully, just as the hotels were beginning to be really snapped up quickly.

The first destination was somewhere I've been once before and never got around to blogging : Granada. So to give y'all two for the price of one, I'll be interspersing this one with some recollections and photos from that trip too.

Granada And Environs

Happening right in between several major flooding incidents, this was not a good time to visit southern Spain. But we got lucky – very lucky. Flying from Prague to Malaga and thence by bus to Granada, neither the destinations nor the routes were in any way affected by the floods at all. Even luckier for us, writing this up a couple of days after getting back, Malaga is now in a different situation. Maybe blogging the experience of an actual disaster (as opposed to a faux hurricane) would be a better way to generate web traffic but I don't think I need that kind of stress.

Anyway, the ALMA "All Hands" is a travelling circus annual meeting for ALMA support astronomers which I've mentioned before. It's useful way of keeping abreast of the latest developments, but it's mainly about admin rather than science. There's little enough to interest the great unwashed general public so I'll concentrate on the travelling.

The four of us coming from Prague decided not to book the bus from Malaga in advance, not knowing how fast we'd be able to exit the airport or if the flight would be delayed. Which it was, though only by half an hour or so. Actually catching the bus was a little... chaotic would be too strong a word, but it was certainly confusing. The bus was showing as fully booked online, a little worrying because there weren't many other buses running that evening, but the bus driver sold us tickets anyway. We had to pay cash. In Malaga city centre the driver called out (in Spanish of course) for people going to Granada, a bunch got off, but we stayed put. Fortunately the very nice young man ahead of us explained that the bus had been over-sold so they'd have to transfer to another one, but assured us we could stay put. So we did. Then pretty much all the would-be-transfers got back on again a long with a lot more people.

It certainly felt chaotic, but it wasn't really. It only seemed so because I have absolutely no clue what the system is (that and some very loud Spanish people and the really rather small seats with very little legroom compared to most other coaches in Europe). I'm guessing that they keep some seats reserved from the app so that people can still walk up and buy tickets on the spot, but I really don't know.

Anyway, a two-hour, rather cramped bus journey got us to Granada's main station, and a short local bus took us to the hotel. As usual with these events, we're all put in somewhere nice so we don't feel tempted to wander off. Which is quite substantial consolation after a ~10 hour trip.

The traditionally-late Spanish eating hours served us especially well the first night, arriving as we did at around 10pm.

I have to say that this was actually a better arrival experience than my first visit. Seven years ago I came by myself for an observing run (we'll get to the telescope later). Flying into Granada airport (probably via Madrid, I think), getting to the city was much easier. But the IRAM guest house where observers stay before heading up to the telescope is uniquely difficult to find. Here's what I wrote in the post I drafted but never finished :

I'd been warned about this, but still... come on. Arriving "after hours" (meaning after 3pm, bizarrely) means you have to get the key from a guard in the adjacent car park. The guard knows what's going on, but speaks no English and fervently believes that SPEAKING LOUDLY AND SLOWLY WILL SUFFICE. It took about 10 minutes of LOUD, SLOW EXPLANATIONS before he let me go away with the key and find my room.

This was completely unsuccessful, for the residencia is contained within a gated complex of other buildings which isn't well-lit and not at all easy to navigate at night. There are no signs or maps telling you where each building is - you just have to go around checking for the one you want. The IRAM key was contained within an envelope, on which was written the room number and contained internet access instructions but didn't have the building number written anywhere. 

So, I wandered around – dragging my heavy suitcase the whole time, wearing my warm winter coat in 18 C conditions - looking at each and every building (there's around 30 of them), carefully checking for the IRAM sign. I couldn't see it anywhere. I couldn't face talking to the guard by myself again so in desperation I asked some wandering people if they could help me. They could. 15 more minutes of talking to the guard, who I was rapidly beginning to dislike (because how long does it take to say, "it's over there, oh, actually, I'll go with you it'll take 35 seconds" ?), with translation, finally found me at the door of the building. It was number 21. There was a sign, but it was tiny and hidden in deep shadow. I could've been wandering around for another hour and not spotted it.

The tiny sign underneath the 21 does have the IRAM logo, but in the dark this is near-invisible. The 21 would have been relatively easy to spot, if someone had only told me the frickin' number.

None of that this time ! I have to say the whole travel experience did get me rather stressed-out, what with the floods, the last-minute booking, the complexity of the travel and whatnot (I've had too many bad experiences with aircraft delays and suchlike), but in the end, absolutely everything went according to plan.

I didn't see much of Granada itself this time, but I liked it.

That leaves the social events of the conference. On my previous visit I went to the Alhambra, as everyone does, but I think I had a more limited, cheaper ticket*. I don't think I saw half of what I did this time. Previously I have to say I went away thinking, ho hum, yes, very nice, but not quite the wonder of the world I was expecting. This time I was considerably more impressed. 

* They also didn't require ID at the entrance. Google reveals that this is indeed a recent change designed to prevent resale of tickets at inflated prices, a thoroughly sensible decision.

I arrived early so I wandered on a bit further. From this rather pleasant little park, you can just see the already snow-covered mountains in the distance. More of them later.

The guide explained that the walls would have been just as bare when first constructed, the intention with the ornate details around the doors being to draw the focus of the viewer.

It also helped that we had a good tour guide. Rather cleverly, they give you wireless devices with a single, large headphone that sort of hangs over your ear instead of in it. This means the guide speaks to you in a normal voice from a distance and you can still hear everything around you perfectly well. I normally hate using a single headphone but it works extremely well here.

The level of detail is so intricate it makes "baroque" look like finger painting. Often my camera was simply inadequate to the task.

Something about that orderly line of cypress trees strongly reminded me of Villeneuve's Dune.

For instance, those cypress trees. We had a running joke that we had to believe anything the guide said, so when someone asked how old they were, he said something like "seventy years" with mock confidence, which someone else – who wasn't in on the joke – took for an actual answer. With impeccable timing, another tour guide happened a moment later to announce to another group that the trees are, in fact, six hundred years old. Well, who am I to doubt them ? 

The second social event, which actually happened right after the conference, was a visit to the IRAM 30m telescope. I don't remember the trip up having quite such a suicidal bus driver, so noting this for future reference : the road is long and extremely windy. You get fantastic views, but quite often I repressed the urge to yell out "SLOW THE FUCK DOWN MAN !" if only to avoid distracting the already obviously-insane driver.

When I arrived last time it was a month later in the year, and it started snowing for the first time that season, quite literally, about twenty minutes after I got inside. This time there had already been a snowfall but it had partly melted, so probably you can't infer anything about climate change from these two data points. Temperature was about zero; last time it quickly dropped to about -10 C.

The telescope is one of my favourite observatories. The cafeteria does excellent food and it's quite an experience to have seafood and wine while on top of a snow-covered mountain and being watched by the local foxes and mountain ponies. One feels distinctly like a Bond villain.

From the observatory cafeteria in 2017. They come right up to the glass, apparently used to astronomers. The telescope is right next to a ski slope so I suppose they've seen weirder.

Ponies from 2017. There was a lot more snow around when it fell, but the cutoff down the mountain was still very sharp.

This time we could simply drive back down again. Last time the snow was by then thick on the ground so the only way was by a combination of cable car (the telescope is right next to ski slope, and do I mean right next – you can watch skiers going past from the control room) and snowcat. It was a really fun way to travel on both counts. One particularly enduring memory is watching the snow blowers from the cable car, backlit by the sun – this is industrial-scale skiing that looks like something out of Blade Runner. These final shots are all from 2017, when I had the time to take more photographs and the weather was more photogenic.

My phone has a good wide-angle lens but my camera had a much better zoom function.

Snowcats are the only way to travel !

You have to remember that this carries on for several miles up the mountain. The scale of the operation to allow people to slide down a hill is massive.

And that was that. The next day at 6am, an unbelievably prompt taxi took me to the bus station and a bus (booked immediately after arriving in the hotel) brought me back to the airport, bang-on time. So off I went to Malta, but I think that'll have to be yet another post, you lucky people.

The Mumbles of Mumbledon

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.

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.

I suppose you have to admit they are very big and firm.

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.

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.

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.

It's good to be the Marquess.

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.