Castell. Guess what that’s Welsh for.

So Caernarfon is about… idk, maybe 40 minutes away, probably less. It’s most well known for a big Edwardian castle, but also has a reputation as being where the bar is that has been recommended to me three different times by three different people. The castle was built in 1283 and Caernarfon became Edward ?s head for North Wales government. They Welsh weren’t super pumped about having the castle here, or being ruled by Ed, so there was a pretty solid history of fighting. Apparently Edward ? became king while on a crusade, and the local Welsh royalty (pretty sure was named Llewelyn, but that’s kinda my go-to Welsh royalty name) was especially not stoked about it, resulting in bad blood, both metaphorically and.. you know, actual bad blood all over the ground, etc. One of my Welsh homies points out that there’s some sort of a joke on Edward, cause hundreds of years later, the city with the biggest castle is one the most proudly/thoroughly Welsh cities.

The bar that was recommended to me is either called the Black Buoy or the Black Boy. There’s a picture of both a black child and a black floaty thingie on the outside of the bar, so it’s kind of up in the air. Okay, I just did a bit of googling, and I found out it’s definitely, without a doubt the Black Boy. So now we know that. Also, there’s another bar somewhere in the UK named the Black Bouy. AAAAnyhow, the Black Boy is like 500 years old. So I went there. Um. It was fine. The beer wasn’t that great, but I’ve generally been underwhelmed by the beer here generally. I know America get a bad rap re: beer, but man, the stuff here is all.. just.. blah. Okay, whatever. The folks at the bar were friendly though, so… I guess that makes up for the mediocre beer? NBD.

The castle was cool. There’s a museum dedicated to the Welsh Regiment, which is pretty much what it sounds like, though the museum was more interesting than I expected. There was a little display dedicated to the American War for Independence, which I hadn’t thought about before, but I was surprised it doesn’t have a name here like the American Tax Revolt or something. They gave props to George Washington for being a good general, so.. go America!

OKay, here are some pictures.

Finally, a note about Welsh. When the name Caernarfon is preceded by the word yn, they kinda meld together into one word that starts with a devoiced & aspirated velar nasal. IT’s cool enough that it happens, but when they’re writing it out, they change the spelling to reflect the pronunciation, leading to Nghaernarfon, which is one of my favorite string of letters masquerading as an actual word.