A tale of Cardiff, Cliffs, and COVID

When Jessica and I left London a few weeks ago, we didn’t leave the UK, but instead went to Wales. Jessica was under a loose obligation to attend a gathering of Fulbright Scholars there, even though most of the rest of them were on UK-specific programs, whereas Jessica is being funded through a “Global” program. Regardless, they asked her to be there, and I thought, “Why not get a chance to see somewhere new?” Something I pretty much never turn down.

After arriving in Cardiff, Jessica spent most of the next three days off talking to a bunch of smart people. I wandered the city on my own, took a tour, and dragged Jessica to the Cardiff Castle in her one bit of free time. Luckily, that one bit of free time had some decent weather. At other times, Jessica walked through a hail storm (that I just missed by ducking back into our hotel room moments before), and my walking tour ended up being swallowed by a deluge. About halfway through it, the skies opened up and the guide, the two Argentines with us, and I all got drenched. The end of the tour was mostly, “Look at this, this, and this. Then lets run over under this shelter and I’ll explain what we just passed…”

Anyhow, overall, Cardiff was a pleasant little city, but outside the castle and a few nice bits and pieces, nothing overwhelming. I wasn’t blown away by the Welshness of Wales either. All the signs are in both Welsh and English, but mostly it seems like everything functions just fine in English and most of the ways of life I’d gotten used to in London pretty much applied here as well. Now, I do wonder if that will change in the future. You see, starting in the late nineties, Wales started to get more power over its own governance. With that, they made Welsh-language education compulsory, whereas the language had been frowned upon in the past. So, I’m guessing that at some point in the future, when a larger number of the residents here have been educated in their own language and see it as the norm, things might start to seem a bit more unique. But, for now, it mostly seemed like a slightly different version of England with some very difficult to pronounce signage. (I hope that analysis doesn’t offend any Welsh folks out there. Just my take from a quick few days here…)

Anyhow, between my wanderings and the tour I took, I did learn a few things and saw some more that were interesting, amusing, or both.

First of all, I learned a bit about the history of Cardiff. In a nutshell, it was a pretty small town until coal became big business in the 1800s and Cardiff was the most convenient port for shipping. The area was under control of a series of guys with the title of the Marquess of Bute. Early on, they were seen as abusive, but the third Marquess of Bute seems to have invested a lot in the city of Cardiff, helping to build a lot of civic infrastructure, and was even elected mayor briefly. Eventually, the fifth Marquess handed control of the castle and other lands over to the city of Cardiff.

The Butes were also responsible for sprucing up Cardiff Castle. The castle was once a Roman fort. You can see the last bits of remaining Roman walls on the outside of the castle; they’re the white stones at the bottom of the wall. Later, a Norman motte and bailey castle was built in the 11th century. This is still preserved in the center of the castle’s grounds. Later the castle expanded and when the Butes took over, they went to town turning it into a 19th century fantasy of a medieval castle (though, on a smaller scale than Ludwig’s digs in Bavaria).

The exterior of the castle is a prety straightforward rectangular shape, but it does have a lovely clocktower with lots of figures representing various astrological and astronomical entities like the sun and the moon.

On the interior, the Norman era castle stands in the center. It feels very much like a classic medieval castle–strictly built for defensive purposes. It rests on a big hill, has lots of arrow loops, crenelations, and surrounds one big central courtyard for most of the living to happen in…

In the Victorian fantasy wing, there were rooms ornamented in all sorts of styles and themes. One room was decked out with a “time” theme, bearing art representing the seasons, a zodiac-inspired ceiling, and stained glass windows for the days of the week. Another room served as a nursery and school room for the kids. Its walls were covered with images of characters from famous stories such as Jack and the Beanstalk, Robinson Crusoe, and St. George and the Dragon. The main reception hall was decorated with more historical scenes, while another room, the “Arab Room” had some beautiful Arab-inspired designs, but was clearly extremely orientalist in presentation.

As always, there were plenty of odd choices. Take the first example below: there were some weird-looking, hungry, little monsters decorating the walls in the time room. And after that, a fountain with angry moles squeezing the life out of some fish (with Bible scenes captioned in Hebrew on the walls). At times, I really wonder what inspired choices like these.

Interestingly, we learned that the interior of the castle walls were used as a bomb shelter during WWII. Sadly, walking through that interior wasn’t terribly interesting, and the route was a one way ticket that took you maybe half a mile around the castle. Oh well.

The Butes’ presence is also felt in other areas of town. A bit north of the commercial center, there’s an area of large imposing civic buildings built by the third Marquess. Now some of them are part of the University, but all still serve some public purpose. They surround a lovely garden that was flowering as spring had sprung in Wales. Of course, like all British public spaces, there was a war memorial there. However, this one was a bit unusual and may have offended the Argentines on my walking tour a bit…

Between these civic buildings and the River Taff, extending about a mile up from the castle is the lovely and varied Bute Park.

I spent a good amount of time exploring here and found some surprising and interesting corners…

• I learned that the park is home to several dozen “Champion Trees.” These are the largest of their variety in Britain. I found the name amusing, but it was also interesing that so many are gathered in one place.

• There was a beautifully carved door to a garden store and cafe, sadly closed when I was there.

• And a beautiful stone circle. Nope, it’s not anything like Stonehenge. This was built more recently for an annual Welsh-language festival/competition as a place for storytelling and the like.

• Across the river, an extension of the park has tons of rugby fields. I found them covered with about 30 or 40 teams of teenaged boys and girls. Rugby is definitely the thing in Wales. The giant stadium in the center of the city is for the rugby team. The footballers play at a much smaller venue.

So, between industry, castles, buildings, and parks, this family of Marquesses from Bute (in Scotland) had a pretty big influence here. I even ran across the Bute name on a gorgeous old building down by the harbor…

Of course, the harbor area was dominated by two much larger buildings, the Millenium Centre and the Senedd. The Senedd is the Welsh parliament. Jess, with the Fulbrighters, took a tour there and learned all about it. The main idea that she relayed to me was about the glass walls representing transparency.

While we’re on the subject of buildings, probably the most pleasant part of downtown Cardiff is the arcades. There are about a dozen little shopping arcades, each with a slightly different look and all lined with cute local shops. I even found a pretty unique free-to-use game cafe space in one, which I thought seemed pretty cool (but possibly unsustainable). Of course, having all this indoor shopping space also make sense given the weather there through much of the year: southern Wales gets the heaviest rainfall in the UK, which generally is a pretty rainy place wherever you are. (Hmmm…maybe this explains the champion trees too?)

Another cool archiectural feature was the old entrance to the building that now houses the Museum of Cardiff. It’s a Victorian era tiled hallway with a variety of different styles, but all pretty fun in their over-the-top-decorness…

Speaking of which, the Museum of Cardiff was mostly underwhelming. It’s one big room with various displays about Cardiff’s history, largely covering stuff I’d learned about on my walking tour. But, there were a couple of cool features. One was a time machine! This let you choose one subject (like the River Taff or Cardiff Castle) and the display would walk you through how that location has changed throughout the last few thousand years. But, the best part of the museum was a tiny corner playing a loop of five-minute videos about different industries in Cardiff’s history. I learned all about cigar-rolling women, fishmongers, pie-making, and more.

My last day in Cardiff, I took a nice walk on the Cardiff Bay Trail. This passed the Senedd and other spots, but mostly just gave some nice views out over the water. The best part was all the fun and creative public art I saw along the way, including some highly creative benches and two very different sculptures that played with different perspectives on faces. I particularly like how the last one alludes to the presence of the harbor on the flip side.

Of course, I’d be remiss to not point out the single best thing about Wales: DRAGONS! Y’all know they’ve got a dragon on the flag, but there were dragons symbolized everywhere, from alleyway art to the dome of the city hall to an unusual sculpture hidden in Bute Park…

If dragons are the best thing in Wales, COVID has to be tthe worst. More on that later, but given the timing, Jessica and I are fairly certain we got it at an event with all the Fulbright folks gathered for dinner. Jessica definitely enjoyed meeting a lot of these people, but it probably wasn’t worth the result…

After the Fulbright gathering ended, Jessica and I had a few days to spend playing in Wales before we were supposed to meet her family in Paris. We planned a couple of hikes, one on the Gower Peninsula and the other in the Brecon Beacons, a national park. So, we head out to Swansea for Jess to meet another contact and as a base for hiking.

I spent most of our one free day in Swansea dealing with our laundry and just generally wandering. Swansea is much smaller than Cardiff, and has a funkier air. A little more of a feel of a gathering place for rural surrounding areas, a little more working class maybe? You can get a tiny sense of that from the diner we ate in and a quick look at the central market, which was more reminiscent of a Latin American market than any other I’d seen so far in the UK.

In the afternoon, Jessica’s friend Darren took us on a drive out of town to the area known as the Mumbles. The Mumbles is a cute little villagey area, but it gets its name from a couple of hills that stick out into the bay there. Evidently some French explorers thought they looked like breasts and used some slang to name them, which over time transformed into the name of the Mumbles. (Reminds me of the Grand Tetons. Clearly, French explorers were just obsessed with finding breasts in nature.)

Better than the Mumbles, Darren took us further along the coast to the stunning Caswell Bay. We walked all over the enormous sandy beach there, observed the disappearing “Wales Coast Path” (which supposedly you can follow along the entire coast of Wales, but definitely is difficult to track at points, like across giant sandy beaches), sipped tea at the cafe there, and watched a tiny dog fetch a giant log over and over. Much thanks to Darren for showing us this great spot!

Of course, by this point in our journey, Jess and I both had some pretty sore throats, but we kept taking COVID tests and getting negative results, so we just assumed it was a cold. (Cue ominous music. But, you know the end result already…)

The absolute best day of our time in Wales was the next one.

When we had visited Claire in France in September, she claimed that the Gower Peninsula, where she grew up, was the most beautiful place in the world, while her husband, Olivier, claimed his home in the Pyrenees was.

Our hike on the Gower proved Clarie was right that the Gower is spectacular. Of course, our hikes with her in the Pyrenees proved they were great too. (Though, neither are the Alps or the Sierra Nevada or…)

Anyhow, we took a bus from Swansea out to Parkmill and went on a long looping hike along the peninsula’s coast. We hiked through the woods, down valleys, across beaches, up and down cliffs, through towns and farms, past a golf course, to the ruins of Pennard Castle, by a set of doorways to little bungalows hidden in the woods, and–most dramatically–along the clifftops overlooking the ocean and several bays: Three Cliffs Bay, Pobbles Bay, and Pwlldu Bay. We even had a distant look back to Caswell where we’d been with Darren the day before. We had a mostly passable route mapped out, but at one point we were supposed to go through a natural bridge along the beach. It was flooded with water crashing around inside. That forced us to climb the cliffs, but brought us to one of the best spots: a little bridge of land separating Three Cliffs and Pobbles Bays. The views in general were amazing, with sandy beaches, bright yellow flowers, sharp cliffs, and soft green grass-covered hills. It looked like this…

What a day!

Of course, the best day had to be followed by the worst. A positive COVID test. As it turns out, it’s pretty common for vaccinated folks to get symptoms first (see sore throats, above) and test positive later.

We cancelled our hike in the Brecon Beacons and ended up having to delay meeting Jessica’s family in Paris as we isolated in our hotel room in Swansea for most of a week. Largely this was a pretty frustrating several days–saddest of all was Jessica’s 320-day streak of 10,000+ steps ending–but there were a few things that made it about as good as I could expect for another bout of COVID isolation:

• Our symptoms were pretty mild. Jessica’s in particular. I had a nasty cough, but that was about it.
• Our hotel room was reasonably large, with a couch, a desk, and a hot pot…
• …which came in handy as the hotel gave us an endless supply of tea.
• The hotel staff was great about running our delivery dinners up to our room every night.
• They were also super-nice when we asked for breakfast the first morning. I asked them to bring us a couple of croissants and some yogurt from the breakfast buffet. Instead, they brought us about a dozen croissants and muffins, some toast, yogurt, orange juice, etc. This kept us fed for breakfast for the next several days.
• With all the added downtime, I caught up on my London blogging (which may have been a little rushed, but at least got written)…
• …and Jessica and I had lots of time to play games on the iPad and we even watched a few movies.

_{A quick aside on my COVID situation. Did I have COVID twice? Not sure. I definitely had it this time. We’re now questioning whether I had it in January. I wonder if I had Delta then and Omicron this time. Not sure. Jessica suspects that in January I only ever tested positive on FlowFlex tests. This was before we discovered that I always test positive on FlowFlex. I seem to remember testing positive on some other brands, but maybe not. That would be very sad if I threw our whole New Years plans out the window for a false positive. So, I’ll choose to believe I had it twice…}

Speaking of movies, one we watched was recommended both by John (in Birmingham) and Darren (in Swansea). It’s called Pride and is about a group called Lesbians and Gays Support the Miners that formed in the 1980s in London to support the striking Welsh miners. It’s cute, feisty, funny, and–I don’t want to give away the end–just awesome. Y’all should watch it. Great lessons about the power of solidarity. Don’t believe me? Read John’s kids’ review of the movie (which they watched as part of their “Film in the Time of Quarantine” series of movies).

Of course, bringing our string of incidents to an end, on the one day Jessica and I had back in London on our way between Wales and Paris, we ran across one of the major sites in the film, the storefront of Gay’s the Word, a center for LGSM’s organizing (with a plaque celebrating the lead organizer, Mark Ashton).

Speaking of the last day in London…the weather was f’in gorgeous! Why wasn’t it that nice when we were living there for three months?!?!?! Grrrr… At least we had a nice long walk along the canal, past Camden, through Regents Park, and more.

Anyhow, glad to be recovered/recovering, we finally got off to Paris a few days later than planned, but still in time to see the Taft/Papile clan. More on that another day…