These have been a great couple of weeks!
A few weekends ago, I went on a school sponsored trip to Avebury and Stonehenge. They are both stone circles, with Stonehenge being the more popular. Avebury is much larger, and actually has a village inside the circle, but many of the stones have been removed for various reasons. They both were in the countryside, which was so beautiful! There were fields all around and sheep grazing throughout them. Stonehenge was wonderful as well! I learned a lot about the history of both of them, which was very interesting!
The following week I went on a school sponsored day trip to the city of Bath, one of England's oldest city. It has the ancient Roman Baths there, which me and a few other Americans did a tour of. It was amazing!! The baths are warm, so there was steam coming up from them which was so cool, and there were ducks living in the baths (smart ducks staying in the warm water haha). I learned a lot about the history of the baths and their meaning and usage years ago during the tour. We also walked through the Abbey in Bath, which was absolutely beautiful! The city itself was gorgeous. The architecture was so old and nice. There was a river running through the city where we ate our lunch and then continued walking the streets, seeing all the nice buildings and scenery!
I have done another hike in the Brecon Beacon mountains. This hike wasn't quite as strenous, even though we did about 8 miles. We hiked around a large lake, and then when we were walking across one of the fields there was a stampede of horses running beside us. It was amazing, like nothing back home! There were great overlooks all along the hike, and we even saw one large mountain covered in snow! And of course before heading back to Swansea, we stopped at a small pub in the mountains and had a quick chat over a drink to learn more about each other. They are all really nice people, most of them study engineering though. I was at a table full of engineers except for one other guy, so we just looked at each other when they talked about school, both looking very confused!
I have turned in my first big assignment this week. It was an 8 page paper for my english class. I had to analyze two of the Welsh authors that we have studied up to this point and answer a prompt that our professor gave us. I wrote about the difference between male and female influences in their writings, and picked two authors and analyzed some of their writings. It is challenging here because the professors are willing to help, but they don't write every little detail out that they expect from you so you have to take the iniative to meet with them, but it is a good way to get to know your professor and his or her expectations. Handing in the paper was pretty different as well, we acutally went to the department and turned in 2 copies with a pre-made cover sheet from the school website. The internet isn't as big of a thing here for school haha. We will see how I do, hopefully an A+!!
This past week I traveled to Bristol over night with 2 of my roommates and one of their friends. We went to a concert of a British band called The Courteeners, a sort of indie-rock band. They are not really heard of in American, but mildly big over here. The show was a lot of fun and the city is so nice. Our train didn't leave until the afternoon the next day, so we woke up in time to see some of the city. We were staying at the University with a friend, so we walked around that area. We went to a really cool musuem that was full of art, animals, and the history of Bristol. The architecture of the city was great too, lots of beautiful buildings!
A couple of days ago I went to London for the night with the dance group at school. We went to see the play Wicked at West End! The play was absolutely amazing! We went by bus, so it took us just under 6 hours to get there, but it wasn't a bad ride because we had a good group of people and plenty of room on the bus. We stayed overnight in a hostel and woke up early to do some sightseeing. Two American girls and myself walked around together and saw St. Paul's Cathedral, which is just awesome! We walked around Trafalgar Square and the surrounding areas. We found a Mexican restaurant too (the first one in Britain yet, we were excited, they are far and few here). We ate a late lunch and then headed to the bus for our 6 hour journey home!
I have had an exciting past couple of weeks, only with even more excitement in my near future!! I am heading off for my month long Easter Break on Tuesday! On Tuesday night we will catch the train to London and fly out in the morning for Athens, Greece! We will stay there for about 3 days and then head to Rome for a few days. Then I will meet up with another person and we are going to go to the Matlese Islands, which is in the middle of the Mediterranean Sea below Italy. We will be there for a few days, and then at the beginning of April I will make my way up to Edinburgh, Scotland to do a week long backpacking tour of Scotland and Ireland where I will be spending Easter weekend, and only to return to Swansea early to work on another paper! I am so excited about the next month and getting to see all these wonderful places!!
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