5.2.14

Travel Catchups: A day in Cardiff, land of handsome men


The UK has the most boss train network (yes that's a technical term), something that Australia fails massively at. Here, even the track gauges between states are different. I just found out last week that we even have a train service that runs to Toowoomba (a city 2 hours' drive west) but it runs twice a week and takes four hours. No thanks.

So as an Australian, the fact that I could get a high-speed train at almost any time of the day not only to a different state but a different country was a rather awesome novelty. Which is what we did when we had some time to kill on Christmas Eve in Bristol, by getting a train across the border into Wales and hanging around Cardiff for a couple of hours.

Probably it was because it was Christmas Eve there wasn't much going on, but we had a nice day walking around, seeing the Millennium Stadium, Cardiff Castle, wandering down to Cardiff Bay and laughing at the ridiculously long Welsh translations on things. I have every respect for the Welsh language, and think it's totally cool the country is officially bi-lingual, but there is a certain hilarity to words like "Llanfairpwllgwyngyllgogerychwyrndrobwllllantysiliogogogoch" (a place on Anglesey we saw on a sign). 

As an interesting aside, we also noted that Cardiff had the highest number of good looking, dark haired young men we saw on our entire trip. 

That didn't help us much when we went to get the train back home though, when some poorly given directions and the Christmas Eve/flood chaos meant we ended up nearly halfway across the country in Swindon and had to risk a sneaky free ride back to Bristol. DAMN YOU SWINDON!!

But yeah. Cardiff was nice.



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