Cardiff, as promised

On Monday I was going to go to Cardiff.  Then I hit snooze one too many times and showed up at the coach station just in time to be told that the Cardiff bus had just left.  Whoops. 

So yesterday, I got up when my alarm went off for the first time, and, feeling quite pleased that I should have an easy journey, meandered to the local tube station.  I live about a ten-minute walk from a station on the Victoria line, the bus to Cardiff left from Victoria station, so all I really had to do was get on the tube, sit there, get on a bus, and sit there.  Travel at it's best, and it worked great.

Until I got there and discovered that, hey, no Victoria line service today.  Why?  Because the tube always fails when you need it most, of course!  It's a law of nature.  There was, however, at that moment a National Rail service to Liverpool Street (within Central London) pulling in, so at the station attendant's urging, I and several others dashed over the bridge crossing the National Rail platforms, and wedged our way onto an overcrowded early-morning train.  It's a faster service than the tube, because it doesn't stop anywhere else along the way, but it's a little more expensive and then I had to wait for ten minutes once I got off that train to pay for the journey I just took.  Alas.

In the end, I made it to the coach station with plenty of time, and it was a more-or-less scenic drive.  The bit of water that you drive over going to Cardiff (I guess it's just the Atlantic; who knows?) is very muddy and not at all appealing.  Lots of sheep along the way. 

We arrived at the central station in Cardiff, and it began to rain.  Of course it was not raining at all for the entire three-hour journey there; only once I stepped off the bus.

I got a cup of coffee and hoped the rain would stop.  It did not.  So I braved it, and went to check out Cardiff Castle, which is smack in the center of Cardiff, very large, and very impressive.  They've preserved some of the actual rooms and have guided tours, but I passed on that because A) it was ten pounds and B) I didn't want to wait an hour for the next tour.  But I walked around the grounds, took some pictures, and once again realized that my life will only be complete when I have a moat around my place of residence.  With crocodiles.  (Not that there were crocodiles in Cardiff, I think it's a bit cold for them there, but it would be neat.)

It was still raining and I was getting a bit chilly, so I headed over to the National Museum, which is also the National Gallery.  They're sort of one and the same, the two entities galleries' leading into the other.  The museum had some dry but informative panels about the various critters and flora that call Wales home, such as "Big giant fish that will steal your soul if you're not careful" and "ducks" and "I'm not actually that interested in the seventy-three different species of ferns that grow in Wales".  But there was also some (more kid- and short-attention-span-friendly) neat stuff on basic geology and the development of the land that is now Wales, and medieval history and whatnot. 

Wales is officially bilingual and about a quarter of their population can/do speak Welsh to some degree.  It's similar to the situation in Ireland in that all the signs are bilingual, but I think far more people actually speak Welsh than Irish.  What makes me think this is that every single video display in the museum - and there were a good number of them - played twice in a given loop: first in English, then again dubbed in Welsh.  Which caught me rather off-guard: "Oh, good, this nifty video presentation about dinosaurs in ancient Wales is just ending, so I can watch it from the beginning."  <Video starts, with absolutely incomprehensible noises>  "Oh.  Or perhaps not."  Also, I stopped in a drug store to pick up some batteries (stupid camera eats them like I eat chocolate), and the "Till x, please" announcements (to tell you which register is now available) was also in Welsh.  Apparently, "Till one, please" takes about twenty-seven syllables in Welsh, and I'm betting you also have to cough up your larynx to get the pronunciation perfect.

Additionally some of the art in the Gallery was pretty nice, though too many Impressionist paintings for my taste.  But I'm not much of an art geek, so I'll spare any psuedo-intellectual commentary on that.

I also spent some time just walking around.  Here's something odd about Cardiff: a few years ago they built a new stadium (the aptly named Millennium Stadium, built in 1999), and they decided to build it in the city.  In the middle of the city.  Pretty much across the street from the also aptly-named Central bus station.  I can't imagine what traffic must be like in the city when there's a big match there.  Granted, they're less dependent on cars here than us dirty, dirty Americans are, but still: It's a huge stadium in the center of their city.  Odd.

I really didn't have that much time in Cardiff - it's three hours away from London which is really at the very upper limit of a feasible day trip, and the last coach back was at 6.  So, having suitably frozen myself walking the unforgiving Welsh streets, I made my way to the bus station, waited for what should have been ten minutes but turned out to be 25, and then the journey home took an extra half-hour because of traffic.  My own transport woes aside, I must give Cardiff my official stamp of approval: Ka- chunk.