Wales Trip!

So after a short day trip to Wales, I've concluded that it's awesome.  For a country smaller than most American states, it has a definite culture of its own.  At times it seems more Swedish than English, which is strange.  The people there are incredibly friendly.  Stuff is a lot cheaper there than in England, which was refreshing.  

Anyway, so the trip began with a visit to an outdoor Welsh museum.  Below is a group photo of most of the Oxford program students that went.  (Note that they're under a thatched roof!)

Of course there was a castle at the museum.  Here is the front entrance.  GORGEOUS!  It looked like Mr. Darcy's place in Pride and Prejudice.

Soooo pretty!

Then we went to Cardiff, the capitol of Wales.  It's about a 2 hour drive from Oxford.  And of course, what's the first thing we saw in Cardiff?  Cardiff Castle!  Because that's what you do when visiting the UK, visit castles. But first, the stocks.

So Cardiff castle, in addition to it's touristy stocks, is built like a fortress, and has large walls and a few castles surrounding it for protection.  This is one of the more ornate of the castles.  The inside was incredible!

The ceiling of one of the rooms of the castle.

This castle was in the other castle, and surrounded by a moat!  Exactly what you'd imagine when thinking about a castle.  We got to climb up to the top, it was intense.

For those of you who don't know, people in Wales speak Welsh and English.  And Welsh is insane.  It's a language of consonants.  Usually when you see a foreign language, you can at least try to pronounce the words, but not Welsh, forget it.  And the whole city of Cardiff has signs written in both English and Welsh.  It's pretty cool.

Brains is a popular type of beer in Wales.  I tried the Brains SA, and it was actually pretty good!  Better than most English beers I've tried.  

We went to a pub called "The Goat Major" to try some authentic Welsh cuisine, and turns out in terms of food they exclusively sold meat pies.  With "chips" of course!  So that's what I had (popular in England too, so nothing too new)  but so good!

Old meets New.  Castle on one side of the street, city on the other.  No big deal.

So yeah, that's Wales.  Kinda goofy, definitely quaint.  A fun day.