Happy Valentine's Day!

This has been quite an exciting week in Wales!!

Last week, Monday and Tuesday were typical days, school and relaxing. On Wednesday, however, things got really fun and exciting! My friend, Austin, and I went sailing with the sailing club. We met in the afternoon with the group at campus and then all carpooled to Mumbles, the town next to Swansea. Once there, we all got suited up in our wetsuits, raincoats, gloves, and whatever we had to keep us warm while on the water. Then we went to start getting the boats ready. We were, of course, sailing in the smallest boats on the lot! We learned the basic lingo of sailors, what the certain parts of the boats were called and basic commands. Once the boats were ready, we took turns getting on the water. There must have been about 15 or so of us new comers, and we had 5 boats to take out. So 5 people went out for about 20 minutes at a time. When my turn arrived, I was so excited! We had to swim a little out into the water, about up to our chest, and hopped on a small motor boat. Right when I got in the water my adrenaline kept me warm, but shortly after our boat ride has began I was feeling the chill coming on. My turn came to hop onto the sail boat. We pulled up next to it and I switched places with the other beginner and there I was, sailing in the wind!! I had a guy that was around my age who told me he has been sailing since he was 11, so I had no worries. It was so much fun, really exciting!! I was the "crew", which is the person in front controlling the front sail (we only had a sail on the front and one on the back since it was such a small boat). It was great, I was getting splashed and holding the front sail tight! It got really cold though, and I had to call it short after about 15 minutes because I couldn't feel my hands anymore. So I swapped back onto the small motorboat, which took me close to shore and I got another swim in. Swansea is the most beautiful from the water I discovered that day!

On Friday night I went to dinner with some Americans. We enjoyed our dinner at a pub in town and then had a drink afterwards, when I noticed a lot of men in kilts. I could not pass on the opportunity to ask them for a picture with me. So that led into a conversation of where they were from and why they were in Swansea. It just so happened that they were staying in Swansea for the night because of the big rugby match happenning in Cardiff the next day (which is the capital of Wales, about an hour from Swansea). It was the Scotland versus Wales game, a 6 nations game, which is the largest rugby tournament over here. I had to take a stab and ask if they had extra tickets, and sure enough they did! So my Canadian friend, Emily, and I had to get them. On Saturday we headed off for Cardiff and met up with the Scottish guys again and went to the match with them. It was held in Millenium Stadium, which hold 75,000 people. It was so amazing! The atmosphere was full of spirit and chanting Brits! It was really exciting to experience a huge rugby game! Scotland was up for most of the game, but in the last 10 minutes Wales game back for the victory, which was cool even though we were surrounded by Scottish people!

On Sunday I went with the hiking club on a 10 mile trek through the Brecon Beacons mountains, about an hour away from Swansea. We hiked up to Pen Allt Mawr, which is a peak at about 2,362 feet up, the third highest in these mountains. It was so beautiful! We hiked up to the peak and the had lunch, and continued along a ridge. The over views were so amazing. It is a lot different then the mountains in Tennessee. There were few trees and sheep and horses were grazing all along the mountains, right next to us! It was so awesome! There were about 12 of us, and I met people from all over the world. There were people from Germany, Holland, Mexico, Wales, England, the US, and probably even more places then that, so there were interesting conversations the whole hike. We were probably hiking about for 5 or 6 hours, and sure enough ended up at a pub at the end of the walk. So we stopped for a beer before heading back to Swansea. It was a great day!

Tuesday was national "pancake day" here in Wales. It is the day before lent begins and everyone eats pancakes to indulge before giving something up for lent (which all my house mates ate pancakes but said they don't celebrate lent haha). So my house mate, who is name Rachel as well, made me some British pancakes. They are extremely thin and I sprinkled sugar and squeezed a slice of lemon on it and rolled it up. It was delicious! Much better than our thick, syrupy pancakes.

For the rest of the week I am going to relax from all the excitement over the past week!!

Week 2

I have survived another week of the cold weather!



Well, I will start off with school. I ride the bus to school most days, it is about 2 or 3 miles away so around a 15 minute bus ride. I am only taking two classes, I feel like a slacker, but this is the amount I am required to take. I have decided to take an English class studying past Welsh writers and studying how their geography influenced their writings. It is really interesting. I did all my readings before class on Monday and I thought that they were so so. Then I went to class and we discussed them and I became very intrigued. My professor is really nice and he is very knowledgable about authors. He makes class very interesting. My other class is a geography class studying patterns of migration and how it affects each culture, the migrating culture and the culture being entered. This class meets on Thursdays and is also very interesting. It will discuss many areas of the world that migration has affected within the past decade or so, but focusing mainly on Europe, and even more on Britain alone. Needless to say, I am really excited about both of my classes. I do feel like a bit of a slacker though haha. But each class requires a lot of reading, about 5 books apiece and about 5-8 articles per classes. As I said before, all the articles I have read so far have been really interesting.



My house is great. I really like all my house mates, and I have finally figured out that there are 5 guys and 5 girls, so a good mixture. It is a 3 story house with two bathrooms. On my floor the bathroom is divided into three rooms, so it is kind of strange. The toilet is in a tiny room by itself, then the bathtub is in a tiny room, and the shower is in another tiny room by itself. It is kind of strange, but actually very convenient if someone needs to use the toilet while someone else needs to shower it can happen. We all hang out in the kitchen since we don't have a living room or a common area. Everyone in my house is extremely nice and helpful if I ever have a question. One of the guys does try to always play tricks on me and the other American girl in the house, telling us they have a British Will Smith that sings Wild Wild West haha. It is funny. I made one of my house mates a peanutbutter and jelly sandwich the other day and he nicely ate it with an awful look on his face. I don't think it was his ideal dinner.



I am getting a bit better with the accents, however, Welsh people are still much much harder to understand than English people. I can almost tell when someone is a Welsh because I have to ask them what they are saying like 5 times before I can understand them. My english professor is bilingual in Welsh and English I believe, so he is so hard to understand. Half of the class I am just trying to understand what he is saying rather than understand the concept. When he ask me a question in class I have to ask him to repeat himself a few times, which is pretty embarrassing in a class of 10 people. In class on Monday he was relating the old east side of Wales to the old west side of Wales and saying that the east looked down on the west during the industrialization period. There are 4 of us Americans in the class, out of the ten overall students. So he looked at us and said, "It is kind of like how people look down on southern people in the US." The 3 other American girls looked at me and started laughing. He looked at me and asked if I thought it was true, I shook my head laughing, and shamefully said, "Yes it is kind of true that they think that way." Haha, it was funny and embarrassing.



Since I don't have school on Tuesdays, I decided I wanted to go hiking yesterday. I woke up early, ready to explore. However, it was so ugly outside, cold and rainy and windy. So I thought to myself that I would postpone until better weather and I looked up the weather for Swansea online and it is the same until Febuary 12, cold rainy and windy. So I decided I would have to fight the weather, since it wasn't going away soon. I went hiking around the south of the Gower Peninsula for about 4 hours. I did the same path as we did last week, but I went much further. I went until I thought it was getting too windy and my hands were frozen (because I forgot gloves, bad mistake), and turned around to make my 2 hour walk back to the town to catch the bus. It was nice not walking all the way there so I could hike further in. I never knew rainy, cold, windy, muddy hikes could still be so beautiful. That area is amazing!



Last night I went with some friends to the pub closest to our house to see a hypnotist from Canada. I had never seen it and it was pretty funny. These first 2 weeks of school are called 're-freshers week' so there are events every night of the week at various places. This was my favorite event I have been too.

I am learning my way around town better each day. I have found the major stores in town and I know the walk to school now. The way the town is set up is different that Knoxville, or anywhere I have been in the US really. It's like all the stores and anything you need is in the 'city center'. That is where a lot of the bars are, restaurants, shops, movie theater and everything else. I think of it as a downtown except with everything you could ever want. However it is about a 30 minutes bus ride from the student village I live in. It is nice though because when I need to go shopping I can go into town and get everything in one stop essentially. Often times it takes me a long time once I get into downtown because I am still a little turned around down there and end up walking in circles for hours. It is fun though, that's the best way to learn too!

I was wondering about campus the other day and discovered that there is a beautiful park ride beside the campus. There were massive trees in the park too. I am not really sure if it is part of campus or not but it is a really nice park to take a stroll in after a hard day in class. The campus is cool, with a nice park on one side and the beautiful sea on the other, pretty neat! Oh yeah, we did get snow here! It snowed last weekend and was so cool. It snowed Friday night, and then the following morning I went to the beach and got to see snow on the beach!!! It was really awesome!

I learned in class that only 20 percent of the Welsh population today can actually speak Welsh. I met a girl the other night who tried to teach me how to sing "head, shoulders, knees, and toes" in Welsh and I just couldn't get it. It may take me all 5 months to get my Welsh tongue working. Everything is in English, but followed by Welsh, it's funny.

Anyways, everything is going good and I am loving discovering the Welsh way of life each day!