So you know how humans are like 18% carbon? I’m pretty sure Brits are at least 18% canned pineapple. Things in which I have unexpectedly encountered canned pineapple in Aberdare: -carrot salad -rice salad -salad salad -mince pie -stir-fry -curry -yogurt -casserole -veggie lasagne I was outraged to find canned pineapple in my lamb tagine …
I missed half of Literature. At the beginning of class I showed up to a lecture hall populated by four other sheepish-looking students who were already trying to figure out why there were only five of us there. There is a strange sense of fellow-feeling that arises when you find yourself part of a group …
As Mom and Dad can attest, getting me to drink milk has been a lifelong struggle. But I have found a liquid nemesis viler than milk, and that is the water in Aberdare. First, it tastes funny, and second, it comes in two temperatures: tea and tepid. So I bought a pint of milk for …
Today dawned miserable and cold—perfect conditions to visit Cardiff Castle without tripping over tourists. (The flaw in my logic was that it was miserable and cold, but I’m not one to let a little common sense get in the way of a castle.) So here’s the tale of Cardiff Castle, to the best of my …
This week’s Welsh Culture and Mythology lecture covered Welsh saints. Looking at an aerial view of a chapel, Professor Wood drew our attention to the round churchyard. Most churchyards are angled. If a churchyard is round, it likely means that the church was built on an earlier Neolithic site. Some still have stone circles on …
Professor Wood on most translations of the Mabinogion: “I’m supposed to say not sufficiently academically rigorous. But what I’m actually thinking is get out the garlic.” Professor Wood on the rugby game on Saturday: “If you went downtown, you saw the Scots. They were the ones in kilts. And you saw the Welsh. Those were the ones who …
Google says that the grammatically correct name for this village is St. Fagans with no apostrophe. This means that there is more than one Fagan. St. Fagans is an open-air museum. It’s centered on “St. Fagans Castle,” which is really a Tudor-era manor house built on the old grounds of a long-gone Norman motte-and-bailey castle: …
Aberdare doesn’t serve dinner on the weekends. This is a bit of a good news/bad news situation. The good news is that I do not have to eat Aberdare food. The bad news is that there is no Aberdare food to eat. The other bad news is that I am a student with access to …
There’s not a lot else to be said. The letters are in the right places, but the shift, tab and enter keys are all caddywhompus. I was going to do my writing today on one of the big-screen Macs in the lounge at the top of the ziggurat, um, I mean Student Union Building, but …
Since the sky looked like rain, I decided to postpone my visit to St. Fagans till tomorrow, when it’s supposed to be sunny. I figured today I would go to Cardiff Castle and finish looking around there. I cut through Bute Park to get there. As I was passing the Pettigrew Tea Room in the …
…so I have no amusing stories to tell. I like all my classes, I watched Maze Runner with Anna and company last night, and I discovered the best chocolate chip cookies in the UK at Lidl, the grocery store around the corner (“Big on quality, Lidl on price,” although the catch is the forty minutes you stand …
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 …