Stonehenge, Bath, and everything inbetween.

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!!

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!

First Week

I have now been out of the states for a week and I am getting settled into the Welsh lifestyle. I will start from the beginning....

The flight was great, and I slept 6 of the 8 hours, so that was nice. Once arriving in London, it took me about 3 hours to make it to my hostel by subway (which was definately not 3 hours away from the airport). Stupid, stupid luggage. The subway system is really nice and easy in London, but not when you have a huge backpack, along with 2 huge suitcases, because you have to get DOWN and the back UP from the subway. So I would leave one suitcases at the bottom and carry the other up, then go get the other suitcase and carry it up the steps. It was a lengthy, frustrating process. Everyone was extremely nice and patient with me though. There were even 3 different people that offered to carry one of my suitcases up the steps, so that was really helpful! London is a busy, fast pace city, but the people there still have the generosity of southerners back home. It is awesome! So I made it to my hostel which was nice and located next to a beautiful park right in central London. I got to see the Picadilly Circus area, which is like a mini Times Square. It was awesome! But also very busy.

The next day I woke up, and needless to say, I took a taxi to the train station. I was not brave enough to do the subway again with all my luggage, and the extra few pounds it cost was totally worth it to me. The 3 hour train ride was great and flew by because I slept about half of the way. I did get to see the countryside while I was awake and it was covered in snow and beautiful! Once I got here I took a taxi again to the Student Village, where I will be living for the next 5 months. I came into my house, and everything was dark and there were a lot of doors, which I had no idea where they led to obviously. So I walked up the steps until someone heard me and then I met a few of my house mates. I met about 4 guys, which were all really nice but I couldn't remember their names or where they were from or anything, I just knew that they all had really cool accents.

Over the next couple days I met the rest of my house mates, and as far as I know there are 5 of us girls and 4 guys, with a grand total of 9 house mates! We all share one kitchen and there are 2 bathrooms. Honestly, I think for that many people this place is fairly clean (way cleaner than when I lived with that many people at the river). I have hung out with my house mates a few nights and normally we are all in the kitchen eating dinner together. They are all really nice and helpful if I ever have any questions. I have met so many other people too, just through where I live and at school. I have even met a few people from UT who I didn't know back in Tennessee.

I finally started school yesterday and that was great! I am taking two class, but it adds up to be 12 hours of classes back home, so that is pretty cool!! I am signed up for 3 classes right now, and this week I am going to all of them and decide which one I want to drop. I am going to be taking one English and one Geography class. The class I went to yesterday was a 2 hour class studying Welsh writers throughout it's history, it was a great first day. My teacher is bilingual in English and Welsh however, so he is extremely hard to understand at this point for me. The Welsh have a much stronger accent than the English, it is wild how much harder it is to understand them. I think it will get easier with time, but yesterday in class I took notes and listened, but I probably only truly understood half of the lecture. The teacher was very nice though. And something really cool, he gave us our book. He asked for 1 pound in return. They must save so much money on books compared to UT students!

Oh yeah, before school started on Monday, me and 2 other Americans went to check out the Gower Peninsula, which I think is in the list of top 10 things that must be seen in Britain. It was Sunday, so the bus is not as frequent, and we are all still learning the public transit system around here, so we just decided we should start walking. We ended up walking to the lighthouse in a town called Mumbles, which is around 6 miles or so away we were guessing. We made it there and then we found all the hiking in Gower and it was sooooo beautiful! We saw the three cliffs area I believe, we weren't really sure where we were or how far we had gone, but we knew it was gorgeous! The beach is right across from the school and is so nice as well, and there is much more hiking to do in the area we made it to, but we wanted to get headed back before dark, so we had to say goodbye to the nice hiking trails over looking awesome cliffs on the beautiful beach. We saw a rainbow on our way out, and we could see both ends and it was really bright! It was so awesome! That is an area that I think I will be spending a lot of time hiking around at (but next time I think I will catch the bus there haha). We got a bus back to campus after returning to the town of Mumbles, and then walked back to the Village, which is about 3 miles from campus. We all decided we had walked well over ten miles that day, but it was totally worth it!

Everything here is beautiful, and the people are extremely nice! I am excited about everything to come in the next 5 months!