Cardiff, London, and a new Year

Arrived in London without a hitch, through Heathrow and onto the train, changed at Greenpark to the Victoria Line to Brixton, up the steps, along the road to The Ritzi and there was Emma. How great it feels to feel comfortable in this enormous city and  how wonderful it is to back here with Emma and Sam.

On Saturday Sam, Emma and I were off to Cardiff for the weekend .... because we'd never been there, it's only just over 2 hours on the train from London. We were hopeful that the journey would be problem free, unlike our train travels over Easter last year when we had train fires, people wanting our seats, being on the wrong train, breakdowns, cancelled trains etc etc. Happily we chugged our way to Cardiff without any problems whatsoever. 

and now some time has passed and it is actually mid January 2014. I hope you all had an ok Xmas, that is, those of you who celebrate Xmas, and your New Year was just what you wanted it to be, and for those of you who celebrate the 6th January - I hope it was a good one for you all.

And now to catch up - Cardiff! 21st and 22nd of December 2013

  

almost in Wales

Well, Cardiff is a much smaller city than I thought it would be. Mind you, I think that my prior impressions have all come from listening to, watching, and reading about the All Black games played at Cardiff Arms Park. We found our hotel which ended up being a little further from the center than the website  had us believe. Probably no big deal when the sun's shining and it's not dark at 4pm but when we were there, being almost the middle of winter,  it was really cold, dark and on Sunday - wet.

Any way,bwe had fun exploring the castle and the tour of the interior of the 'residence' part of the castle with a guide. I swear that there's a special school for special people who aspire to being 'guides' - they certainly are 'special'.

 

the castle from outside the walls

 This is  the 'residence' part of the castle, which we went through with the guide, from inside the castle walls

 

  the 'keep' which was really interesting and had a lot of steps to climb to get into it! Unfortunately we had to cut short our wanderings around in there in order to get to the start of the tour on time.

 

inside the 'keep'. The view from the top would have been fantastic but we didn't get up there. Once upon a time there were rooms  inside the walls of the 'keep' where the grass is.

The top most part of the castle residence 

I have no photos of the interior, I don't think photos were allowed. That's the problem of putting off writing, memories fade - speaking for myself only. 

By the time we came out of the castle it was truly dark and we decided to walk to Cardiff Bay which, according to the lady at the hotel, was a short walk from the city centre and we would find lots of bars and restaurants. So we wandered our way through the center

 Some of Cardiff's Xmas street lights 

And on we walked, on and on and on and on some more. We weren't sure just how long it took but we all thought that it was a long time and, according to Sam and Emma, we were walking through the 'bad lands'. It was so dark and cold and not another person to be seen, nothing except the back of the railway and a number of what looked like warehouses and factories., and empty streets.

Finally we got to 'the Bay' and were greeted by this brightness

The hotel lady was right about the restaurants/bars - there were quite a few but all of them are chain restaurants. We were disappointed because we were looking forward to having a Welsh food experience not just the same hash that a chain  restaurant puts on. We had a determined look to find  a decent one but eventually we just picked one so we could at least eat something. It was ok, nothing to write home about. At least we were out of the cold. We couldn't be bothered traipsing through the 'badlands' again so we hailed a taxi back to the hotel, up the 3 flights of stairs to our room and that was that day done.

Sunday was looking pretty good when we woke up, blue sky and sunshine, still really cold though. After a full on breakfast at the hotel we set off to the center to get on a city tour-bus ride. Turned out we'd just missed one so to fill in the time before the next one we explored a shopping arcade over the road. I'd hoped to maybe find some christmas presents but didn't. However Emma found a shop dedicated to board games with a shop assistant who has a passionate interest in her shop's stock. She was a mine of information and we had quite a nice time in her shop. Emma bought a game called 'Gloom' for Brit so she was happy.

Time for the tour bus trip - we ignored the  dark clouds that were gathering and went up to the top deck. Not much point to sitting below. Well, turns out that there's not a lot to see on a tour of Cardiff. So little in fact that included in the tour is the bus station, a drive past the John Lewis department store no less! Plus, we went past a statue of, to quote the tour guide,  "Robert Scott who hset out from Cardiff Bay on his ill-fated journey to the SOUTH ATLANTIC" oh boy these tour guides are special!

 We did at least see Cardiff Bay in daylight albeit rather dim daylight. The gathering clouds gathered over us and sent down a deluge which had us scurrying for cover at the front of the top deck. Fortunately, some people abandoned their top-deck-under-cover-seats for the more sheltered 'below seating' so we were able to stay on the top. It just got colder and colder, no snow though, and I was mighty pleased to get to the end of it. 

We crossed over the road to the arcade to find somewhere warm to have lunch and to thaw out. Luckily we found a cafe which fitted the bill. To finish lunch we had hot chocolate for Sam and Emma and a coffee for me. We were a bit taken aback at the size of the hot chocolates!

After lunch we decided that we'd had enough of wandering about being cold and wet so we walked back to the hotel to have a beer or two and wile away the time until it was time to collect our bags and get to the station for our train back to London. We found a scrabble game so got going with a game of Scrabble and all was going well, or not so well, depending on who you talked to, when Sam put down 'dojo' - triple letter, double word etc etc - lots of points BUT guess what - turns out that Emma was about to put down the exact same letters in the exact same place. Well, that caused a bit of mayhem and then, according to Emma, it was time to get to the station. We taxied to the station which it took all of 10 minutes so we had heaps of time to wait at the station - Sam and I decided that it was Emma's way of ending a game that had suddenly  lost it's attraction! mmmmmmmm

 To fill in time we got a coffee and wrote out some post cards and happily, there was a post box right there so they got posted as well.

another interesting language. We heard quite a lot of people speaking Welsh.

Eventually the time came to say goodbye to a wet and cold Cardiff and be on our way back to London and the delights of Brixton, Xmas shopping - NOT IN OXFORD STREET- . Not a snifter of a problem on the way back to London either.