Chewy Sausages, Victorian Tea, and the Shopping Mall Horror Movie

Here’s another youth hostel hack: Do not, I repeat do not, fall victim to the sausage.

I had the prepaid breakfast. It was a pretty classic British breakfast buffet, with baked beans (probably canned, but tasty), hash browns (how can you screw hash browns up?), butter croissants (delicious), bacon (looked vile; didn’t risk it), and a cold bar of yogurt and canned grapefruit. And then there was the sausage. How on Earth do you make sausage chewy? There are lots of words I associate with sausage—spicy, greasy, firm, soft, German—but chewy?

I spent about an hour eating, reading on my kindle, and trying to figure out exactly how I was going to spend my day with no car, no way to carry my laptop because my satchel is still full of clothes, and no transportation, not to mention it’s pouring rain and my red wellies are still full of tank tops and scarves and Kinnucanized at the bottom of my suitcase.

Finally I asked the nice young clerk at reception what I ought to do in Cardiff on a rainy day. We spent fifteen minutes mutually baffled over a bad cartoon map of Cardiff with him trying to give me directions to Morgan’s Arcade and me trying to memorize the landmarks he gave me—lightning bolt sign, Cineplex, Burger King, rail bridge, traffic circle—because Google Maps on my phone is having some trouble cooperating with its international data plan.

Over the course of the day I managed to find almost all the landmarks the nice earnest clerk laid out for me. Out of order. Long after I’d given up. Ooh, look, there’s the Cineplex! Oh, hey, what do you know, a Burger King! It was kind of like a scavenger hunt.

Mostly what I did was get lost, repeatedly, in St. David’s, the sprawling multi-level shrine to globalization. There are very few stores there that you couldn’t also find back home—Forever 21, Auntie Anne’s Pretzels, Hollister, H&M. But this place was easily four times the size of the mall I grew up with. What I didn’t realize at first, and learned the hard way, is that it occupies multiple buildings and the bridges and corridors between them don’t always have windows, so you don’t realize you’ve crossed over Queen’s Street or The Hayes until you come out a different door and Google Maps is seriously confused how you teleported three blocks.

Actually, most of the city center seems to be St. David’s Mall. There are some flagstoned pedestrian streets with trees, but every time you wander into a doorway thinking ah, finally, I’ve escaped, you’re like, wait, I’m back in St. David’s. Actually, you could make a pretty good horror film about the shopping mall that spreads like fungus, hollowing out innocent Victorian and Edwardian terraces when you aren’t looking, so that no matter which doorway you walk through to get out of the rain, you’re back in a tile-floored corridor across from an Auntie Annie’s Pretzels or a Shake Shack. And when you give up and go home, you open your bedroom door to find yourself in Claire’s.

Anyway.

From the outside, at least, Cardiff’s city center is full of Victorian and Edwardian brick and stone buildings, some of them quite beautiful. I walked into a Waterstone’s—if it was part of St. David’s, which is entirely possible, at least it’s a bookstore—and spent a few hours reading, just to dry off. Most of the interior looks like your typical Barnes and Noble, but the top floor (where they keep the science fiction) is accessed via an original imperial staircase with fat mahogany banisters.

I eventually found Morgan’s Arcade. Think Victorian shopping mall—narrow cobbled alleys covered by a leaded glass roof. It was surreal. For one thing, after the bustle of St. David’s, the narrow flagstoned corridors were completely empty, and nearly all the shops were closed. They were a mix of chain stores—there was a Joules and a L’Occitane—and hipster-looking record stores and secondhand shops, all in those narrow Victorian storefronts with the Venetian glass windows. The upper galleries are painted powder-blue with elaborate white molding. The rain pattered on the glass roof overhead and filtered the light, making everything feel and sound clammy without actually being wet.

I found the most beautiful tea shop in the middle of Morgan’s Arcade. Its name is the Plan Café, and it’s one of those places that breathes history. Usually I reserve the expression “breathes history” to older history—atmospheric castles or stone circles, maybe—but this was a sort of living history that wears an elaborate veiled hat with a stuffed bird on it and trills in a plummy accent. You could just tell that this place had been a café for a hundred years; maybe not the Plan Café all that time, but always a tea shop. The building is a tall, narrow, irregularly hexagonal building with very old creaky floorboards and a very high ceiling. Most of the Victorian buildings I saw today had been gutted and retrofitted with modern interiors, but this retains all its original woodwork. The first floor is crammed with tiny tables. An extremely narrow detached stairway climbs steeply up to the much lower-ceilinged second floor, which is stuffed with more small tables around a railed cutout in the floor. You can’t really call the top story a wraparound balcony, because the cutout in the middle is only just wide enough for the three chains that suspend the wrought-iron hoop lamp over the downstairs counter. The interior of the cutout is laid with tiny old blue and white fleur de lis tiles.

The white paint on the window mullions is peeling, and the glass is rippled with age. When you’re in a room with windows, you expect the light through them to be outdoor light, but these windows overlook the arcade, sheltered by that cloudy glass roof. The light through them is strangely muted, and even though you can hear the rain, it isn’t tapping the glass.

I can’t speak to the quality of the food, because all I ordered was tea (what I was really paying for was the opportunity to sit there for a few hours, out of the rain and off my feet, with just my Kindle and that beautiful architecture for company). There were a fair number of other people there, but also plenty of tables.

When I was finished and went to pay at the counter downstairs, the owner of the café was at the till. I told him I had a stupid American tourist question—I wanted to know if he knew when the café had been built. He said he didn’t know the exact year, but it was sometime in the 1880s. I said it was beautiful. He said sure, it looks pretty, till you have to try to run a café out of it. I would have loved to ask him about the specific challenges of that old building (the history geek in me overrides the basic shy introvert in matters of historical architecture), but somebody else got in line behind me and I didn’t want to hold up the line. I’m going to have to go back sometime and ask. I’m really genuinely curious.