The kitchen on my floor is only fifteen feet from my room, but there are three doors between me and it—my room door, the fire door at my end of the hall, and then the kitchen door. A minor but persistent irritation for me is that, while I never lock my bedroom door while I’m in …
So I thought I was the only UBC student at Cardiff this semester, because at the Study Abroad conference in October I was definitely the only person with “Wales” on my Hello My Name Is tag. But today I happened to sit down in my Cleopatra class next to a girl with an accent similar …
As a Portlander—we’re amphibious and our heraldic device is an umbrella—I thought I was prepared for British weather. It turns out I was wrong. Nobody does foggy and damp like the Brits. After a week and a half of trying to tough it out, I have concluded that my pitiful heap of sweaters, jackets, scarves, …
80% of my love of the UK stems from clotted cream. This is a miraculous substance with the appearance of sour cream, the taste of whole milk, the texture of custard, and the nutritional value of a can of Super Whip. One of my first missions, upon settling into Cardiff, was to locate a reliable …
It’s a biscuit… …I add milk… …alchemy happens… …and now it’s cereal. Why do we not have this? (Possibly because it looks like a lab block?) Anna told me that normal people eat their Weetabix with honey and fruit, but the novelty hasn’t worn off for me yet and I prefer my alchemical substance in …
I feel like I didn’t think this through. In the US, cake is something you see at parties, right? You might occasionally get a slice in a bakery for a snack, but it’s really more of a special occasion thing. Here, cake is exactly like muffins or cranberry bars or shortbread or cookies or brownies—even …
This is what my morning looked like: Climb six flights of Mayan Temple of Doom stairs to the international office in the Student Union. Be told that if I want to sign up for classes, I have to go directly to the departments. Descend six flights of Mayan Temple of Doom stairs. Walk a few …
The secret turned out to be buying a laundry card instead of wrangling with the app. A good piece of plastic with a barcode is always more reliable than an app. (Except when it’s my school ID, which claims to open the back door of Aberdare and DOESN’T. I digress.)
For some reason, timetables are a top secret at Cardiff University. Class times aren’t listed in the course catalogue, they aren’t posted online, and while STEM students have an app which spontaneously generates their schedule as soon as they register for classes, humanities students do not. In fact, my Welsh professor didn’t know what time …
The laundry app that talks to the washing machines in Aberdare thoroughly deserves its 1-star rating in the app store. It let me create an account. It told me to scan the code on the nearest connected machine to establish my location. In the time it took for me to walk from my room to …
Here. Have a castle picture. This is one of the Bute family’s Victorian additions to Cardiff Castle.
There is no panic so pure as the panic of jolting out of deep writing flow to the sound of a fire alarm, unless it is the panic of jolting out of deep writing flow to the sound of a fire alarm in a building you still get lost in. After a brief internal struggle as …
At breakfast, I ran into Anna (she who recited the entire War of the Roses to me over dinner two nights ago). She’s a history major from small-town Essex, and she volunteered to show me around downtown. We agreed to meet up as soon as we got our things together. After one false start that …
Outside the rugby stadium, there are mosaics representing English-speaking countries. Canada has, let’s see, a salmon, a baseball bat, a steamer ship, a moose, a mountie, possibly a representation of logging? New Zealand has a dolphin, a mountain goat, a palm tree, a lizard, a canoe, and some kind of fern. Scotland gets a salmon, …
And here is why:
The cabinets in the kitchen on my floor are papered with unfriendly notes to the effect of: “Do not use my stuff—it’s not yours.” So, contrarian that I am, I gathered up the five extra forks from the six-pack I got at Wilko and left them on the counter with a sign that says “Free …
I can’t do laundry until I get a chip-and-pin debit card that works on the Aberdare washing machines. I have four days of socks left and five days until my appointment at Santanders.
I talked my way into the microfiction creative writing class that the faculty advisor wouldn’t let me sign up for yesterday because I didn’t have the prereqs. And when I say talked my way into, I mean blurted out my entire resume to the faculty advisor and begged her to talk to the chair of …
It was mostly white and the texture of lumpy custard, with shiny semi-translucent shell-pink globs that vaguely resembled jellyfish sushi. They quivered like jello but crunched grittily like pear and tasted vaguely like sweet gelatin. I think it was dessert?
So Bute Park is the huge, partially-forested parkland between the river, the university, and the downtown area. It used to be part of the extensive castle grounds. There are lots of walking paths and some footbridges over the river. It’s a good place to go for a jog. There are signs all over that say …