Last week we embarked on a grand adventure to Wales with the Explorer's society (a fabulous club all about walking, hiking and of course exploring). Our first trip across the Bristol Channel took us to the tiny town of Gower, a charming West-Wales village complete with a sandy beach, shipwreck, and an island only reachable at low tide.
We started the day walking down the beach, we combed the sand for sea-shells -which are now adding much needed decoration to our flat! It was a pretty warm day for February, in the mid 40's to mid 50's (Fahrenheit), but we were still shocked to see surfers catching waves. Granted they had full body-suits complete with hood, gloves and footies, but those we saw emerging from the water still looked frozen solid!
Poking out of the sand on the beach, you can see what remains of the masts of the Helvetia -a ship from the late 1800's that wrecked offshore. It was apparently full of timber and the locals profited by selling the wood that floated in.
After a quick lunch, we headed towards The Worm's Head islands. You can only cross the rocky ground to the actual islands during low tide, and the higher tides had left us lots of fun little tide pools to look in on our way. The Worm's Head is made up of two islands with slanted slabs of rock (the part that gets covered up by the tide) separating them from each other and from the mainland. From the top of the last island you can see the beach and a lot of the Wales landscape. Beautiful! Occasionally a happy little seal bobbed its head up out of the ocean to say hello. There were lots of sheep all around -even on the island and some had long tails that made them look almost like foxes dressed in sheep's clothing.
We discussed differences between the U.S. and England with our British companions the whole way back to Bristol. Here are a few of the things we learned:
Pants = Underwear
Trousers = What we call pants in the US
Jelly isn't really used in the UK -just jam- our friends didn't really know what jelly was so we had to explain that it was jam without the seeds or preserves.
Eating biscuits and gravy does not happen in England -they looked at us like we were crazy! Also the closest thing they have to our "biscuits" is scones which they only eat with jam or fruit
never gravy.
Marmite= Our explorer friends thought that the United States is an excellent place because it doesn't have it! They found extracts from bacteria just as gross as we did...
Every area has a distinct accent and they all sound different to each other -but to us they mostly just sound British!
Cardiff
Museum was by far my (Dakota) favorite museum I have been to since we arrived
in the U.K. After seeing dinosaurs, fossils, a lot of artwork and an
animatronic woolly mammoth we went into the section on the Origin of Wales.
Wow! As an Archaeology student I was in heaven! They had artefacts (it is
spelled with an 'e' here) from the Neanderthals all of the way to medieval
times, including a few skeletons. The skeleton's were especially interesting
because in the United States we hardly ever see actual human remains due to the
Native American Graves Repatriation Act, so that was quite a shock to us! We
filled in a lot of gaps in our education on the United Kingdom in that museum. In a park in front of the museum we stopped at
a bench to eat our lunch and realized that we were sitting around a stone circle,
apparently ancient stone circles are common enough here that they didn't feel
the need to identify the landmark in any way... It was interesting to see our
first stone circle though!
After
exploring the numerous arcades we made our way back to Cardiff Castle where we
were given a tour of the portion of the Castle that was inhabited during the
Victorian Era. It was very grandly decorated; all of the ceilings were painted
and had beautiful artwork and gold decorations. Of course the castle would have
never looked anything like that in the medieval times, but the Medieval Revival
in the Victorian era greatly romanticized the idea of medieval life and the
castle greatly reflected that exaggeration. The most interesting portion of the
Fortress was the Castle Keep in the center of the Fortress, complete with moat
and tower. There was a portion along the stairs where we were informed by our
favorite tour guide Elvyn that people were walled up alive in when the castle
was in use! That was a little disturbing to think about but we soon shuddered
that thought away. As we explored the walls of the fortress we came across a tunnel
into the wall and when we entered a motion sensor activated an audio track of a
WWII air raid! You should have seen us jump as a speaker shouted at us "I
AM TALKING TO YOU!" amidst the drone of air sirens and explosions in the
distance! Apparently the walls had been used as a bomb shelter, we found out
the exciting way! After a brief walk through the Wartime Museum below the gift
shop we headed back to Bristol after an exhausting day in Wales.
