You guys, I’m a machine today! TWo posts, now I’ll only be two or three days behind.

But, I’m sleepy, so limited words. Cardiff, Sunday. Hostel, wander around, take photos, have snacks, etc. Find bar with punk show, enjoy show, enjoy bands, great chats, mutual friends, small world, etc. Got invited to go to a cool show the next day, lost the guy’s number. Bummed. Went back to hostel, had another day in Cardiff, more to come.

COOL.

This probably doesn’t deserve an entire post, but whatever. I went to this bar last week, where I had some beers with some friendly local guys. They organized an open mic night at the bar Wednesday nights, and they suggested I come by next time. As a rule, I think open mic nights are terrible, but, you know, when in Wales… PLus it was actually the second time I’d heard about the open mic night. A girl that sold a classmate her SIM card had also mentioned it. Basically, it was a big deal.

It started off as a pretty normal open mic night, except for the people in the audience all seemed to actually enjoy it. It was like, they were there for the entertainment, not just there to support a friend, or not just there because they thought a football game was gonna be on or something. So the crowd was pretty into it, which was enough to make it more interesting than I’d expected. The highlight was at the end of the night, when two.. um, oh, fiddlers! Yeah, two fiddlers played, later accompanied by the MC on guitar and two dudes sharing keyboard duties and the bar as a hole filling in on percussion, aka banging on everything. I took a video of that last bit, but it was pretty wobbly, so I’m not going to post it.

And… here’s a video of people playing fiddles.

That was last Wednesday, a week ago. Presumably there’s another open mic happening right now, but I’m not likely to go check it out. Anyhow, a couple days go by, Friday comes around, and the director of the summer school lets us know about a performance at the university that night. Some folk singers or something. So, since we don’t have other plans, we go check it out. Turns out the two fiddlers we’d met at the bar were also in one of the bands playing that night. (Finally got around to looking them up. Calan, they’re called.) Anyhow, they were great, as were all the other performers, though none were quite my cup of coffee. The last number features about thirty people, basically everybody that performed that night, including Ballet Nimba, a West African dance company.

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.

View Day in Snowdonia in a larger map
Well. I finally decided to do it. Mount Snowdon, aka Yr Wyddfa, is the highest peak in England & Wales, and it sits in the middle of a pretty big national park named Snowdonia.   So that’s pretty cool.  (Incidentally, Wales is about the size of New Jersey.  Put that in your pocket.)  One of my classmates had given me a map and a guidebook, and I’d been making plans to go for awhile. I wanted to go last weekend, but inertia kept me in Bangor. I really wish I would have, because last weekend the weather was apparently beautiful. But I’m getting ahead of myself.  What follows is a long, long account of how I spent my sister-in-law’s birthday.  Then there are pictures, including plenty of “selfies,” as the kids call them.  And me. I call them that, too.

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The good news is that I’ve been busy enough to not want to spend a ton of time documenting stuff.  The bad news is that the less often I stop to document stuff, the less I ultimately document, etc.  Anyhow, I’m doing laundry again today, so I thought I would take some time to post photos.  Hopefully this will be the last post in which “Bangor” is used in the title.  Kinda sick of saying that.  Mostly cause every time I have to think about how it’s pronounced.  Anyhow, these photos are pretty much from the first week I Was here and last week.  Have a lot more from the most recent weekend, which was pretty awesome..  So.

Hi friends,

IF you’re reading this, you will have probably noticed mounting evidence that I’m not in DC this summer. Why not? Well, it gets quite hot in DC in the summer time, and I’m fancy & I don’t like the heat, etc. so I came to the UK. So the summer plan, in bullets:

• Hang out in Chicago & do a year’s worth of weeding in my backyard.
• Hang out in Boston and teach Z. Pants how to do stuff
• Fly to Dublin, take a train to a port outside of Dublin, take a boat to Holyhead, Wales, take a bus to Bangor, Wales, rest.
• Take a Welsh class, because why not?  Meanwhile, tackle the summer reading list & see some old castles and churches and stuff.
• Hang out in London and Edinburgh with my dad, because tradition.
• Walk to ~Glasgow with my dad, uncle, cousin, and assortment of native/naturalized Texans.
• Make way back to Dublin to see friends & meet friends’ kids (!)
• Return to ‘Murica, plan class, write dissertation, etc.

So far, I’ve done the first three of those bullet points, and I’m a third of the way through the fourth.  This post is photographic evidence of.. um, I guess like.. point three?  No, this post is a post, but it contains photographic evidence.

Actually, not even very much. I wrote that paragraph before I looked at the photos I had taken, and there’s not a lot. Plus, while I was in Chicago with the weeding and in Boston with Z Pants, I was taking the photos on my phone, and I ain’t about to deal with that.  So..  um, ignore whatever expectations I created and enjoy these five or six pretty dumb photos.  As I knock out more items on the list (like reading articles from the summer reading list, going to London, seeing naturalized Texans, etc.) I’ll post MORE evidence, so you can keep me honest.  Deal?  Deal.

UPDATE: Actually, there are eight pretty dumb photos here, but PLENTY more to come.  Also: dumb captions.

 

*In Ireland, I saw my first V40 with the steering wheel on the right side, and it totally freaked me out. I was staring at it, trying to imagine what it would be like to fiddle with my cd player with my left hand instead of my right, trying to imagine what angle would best capture both the beauty of the car and the absurdity of the wheel placement, in a kind of weird reverie, when the owner of the car approached. He didn’t seem to be super stoked at my weirdness.

Which reminds me, driving on the left? Still hard to get used to. BUT I decided that, as long as we have to arbitrarily pick side to drive on, it might as well be the side that allows us to go around traffic circles clockwise. Also, where’s the clutch? Is everything a mirror image here? Crazy!

What’s Bangor like? Well, as far as doing laundry goes, it’s pretty much what you’d expect.