Cardiff

Well, it's Monday again, so I'm doing the same thing I always do on Monday: slave away at a philosophy paper. Damn you, De Tocqueville!!!! But I had a fairly enjoyable trip to Cardiff this weekend, which was a nice break. That's the third weekend in a row I've been out of town.

As you will see when I finally get around to talking about Ireland, I thought I had found the least appealing place in the United Kingdom (namely, Crewe. No coincidence it rhymes with eww). How wrong I was! The first place I changed trains on Saturday was Didcot Parkway, and now I can confidently say that that is the most unappealing place in the country. The entire area is essentially one big switch yard overshadowed by a huge nuclear power plant (remember that Nuclear plant that looked so nice from far away way back in the post about Salisbury? yeah, not so picturesque up close). Needless to say, I was glad to get out of there on time.

And a good thing that the train was on time, since if I missed a connection I was hosed. The plan was to meet my family, who had just arrived at Heathrow early that morning and apparently experienced no small difficulties of their own making the train on time, aboard the train between London and Cardiff. If one of us was not on the train, there was no way for us to get in contact with the other. It's doubtful that we would have ever met up and I probably would have perished in the cold lying in a ditch somewhere near Dorking (yes, there is a town called Dorking). But happily, it didn't come to that. While I did meet the train at Swindon instead of Reading, I bounded aboard and literally ran into my Dad. After an emotional reunion ("hey Matt". "hey".), I settled into the luxuriant 1st class seats with the rest of the family and caught up as the train rocketed through the Welsh countryside.

Imagine our surprise to find the train getting progressively fuller of red-clad Welsh rugby fans. Turns out that there was a big international Rugby match that very day. New Zealand vs. Wales, which apparently is a somewhat bitter rivalry. In any case, that meant that 1. We finally had an explanation of why hotel rooms were so hard to find 2. Much of the city was closed down for the game and 3. there were crowds of very large sports fans of varying degrees of intoxication everywhere. We managed to find a cab (piloted by the most helpful cab driver ever, as we shall see) and rode off towards our lodgings. Because of the match, every hotel room in the city was taken, driving us to stay in an apartment that the owner lets out while he's not home. Sounds good, but the trouble is we had a hard time getting in touch with the company that was supposed to give us the key to the place. The first address we went to was a deserted storefront in a scuffy part of town. The cabbie hopped out of the cab and rang the doorbell (now that's service!) then tried the number on his cell phone with no success. The next address was indeed the apartment complex in question, but with no key-giver in sight. We eventually managed to get in touch with her (she just wasn't expecting us until later), but with every hotel in the city full, for a while it looked like we may have been spending the night in the aforementioned ditch near Dorking.

After a mediocre but perfectly serviceable dinner at a Thai restaurant in a newly developed pedestrian area by the waterfront jauntily named "Mermaid's Quay", we retired to the spacious apartment for bed at the ambitious hour of 8:30. Parenthetically, Wales lost the Rugby game 29-9, and given how British sports fans have a history of being somewhat sore losers perhaps it was good to be indoors. The rest of the family went to bed very early with a case of jet lag, while I stayed up to read for the very paper I'm ignoring now. Quite an evening. No seriously, it really was kind of nice.

I'm not precisely sure why I suggested that we go to Cardiff. I suppose it's because I enjoyed Conwy so much. And I'm quick to say that Cardiff is a very nice, cosmopolitan European capital city (its the capital of Wales, which is sort of its own country in a way that I don't fully understand and cannot explain. Bottom line is, the Queen is still on the money, so...). Perhaps that's just it: in many ways, it reminded me of Dublin, sans Guinness, James Joyce, shops selling stuff with Guinness logos/James Joyce on it, and Irish people. Which is to say, some of the good parts.

Our main event for the day was visiting Cardiff Castle. While very, very different from the castle in Conwy (Imposing Rural Ruin vs. Urban Well Maintained attraction) I liked it in a different way. Worst Part: the goofy,narrationless video depicting the history of the castle via scenes of a girl running through modern Cardiff bumping into reenactors in period dress. Best Part: touring the residential part of the castle. While the site had had a fortification on it since Roman times, after the early 19th century it was used as a residence by the Marquesses of Bute. The 3rd Marquess was an especially awesome gentleman by the name of John Patrick Crichton-Stuart. In addition to having a sweet name, he was also one of the richest men in the world. He owned the Welsh coal mines that provided 1/5 of the worlds coal in the 19th century, as well as the railroads, canals and docks used to ship it. In today's money, his yearly income was estimated at £3 billion, which is more than enough to spend some of it upgrading and redecorating your castle (even thought he only lived there 6 weeks out of the year). Bute's taste in interior design can be summed up as "let's get as much really expensive stuff going on as possible". Every flat surface in the entire house was lavishly decorated, including a significant portion that was gold leafed. There was a single room that would have cost £15 million. This guy used gold as wall paper. If there's anything more ballin' than that, I have yet to hear about it. Plus, like many of his contmporaries, he had an excellent beard.

The rest of the castle was not quite as impressive, even though it probably would have been better recieved by the hosts of "Trading Spaces". There was a museum about the Welch regiment of the British army, a Norman-era motte and bailey keep to explore, and not one but two giftshops. But the highlight was the tour of the apartments. While my visit to Conwy made me realize that it's good to be the King, my trip to Cardiff prompted the collarary "or at least a obscenely rich Scotsman". After the castle and a brief trip to see the self-proclaimed "World's largest Welsh Love-spoon", we dropped by a pub (curiously appellated The Goat Major) for a pint of Brains and then headed to the National Museum. While no Smithsonian, I thought it was a fairly impressive as museums go. In addition to an exhuastive display about the geology of Wales (I mean, really, you can only look at so many rocks in display cases before giving up and returning to the pub), there was some French impressionist pieces and a copious amount of ceramics.

The lady at the information desk recommended a nearby resturant for dinner. I really liked it, despite the fact that they were out of almost everything, presumably because the Rugby fans had rolled throught the day before like a plague of locusts. After dinner, we caught a taxi back to the apartment, where I collected my belongings and hopped back into the same taxi for a lift back to Cardiff Central. I had to much to do for the upcoming week to spend another night. Which reminds me; I have too much to do to sit around blogging! Back to work. My only real regret about the weekend is that on my return train ride, I unknowingly selected an itinerary that brought me back through Didcot Parkway. And man, that is one ugly town.