Hello everyone! It’s been a wonderful week full of long walks, meetings, and plenty of Tesco meal deals. I feel like my last blog post was a lifetime ago!
I checked in to my hostel on the 24th after having been in a hotel room for a few days – although “checked in” is a bit of an overstatement. With a completely DIY check-in process that involves an online key and no assigned beds, this is definitely one of the strangest hostels I’ve ever stayed in. I had been looking forward to socializing after spending a few days in a room to myself, but the vacant room and the sparsely furnished common area seemed to have other plans for me. So, I dedicated the following few days to my research – walking around different parts of the city, photographing the landscape, and having some very insightful conversations with two professors at Cardiff University. I’ve run into some hurdles with some contacts being away or having to meet online, but nonetheless, it’s been a productive leg of the journey.
Two days later, however, the stars aligned – people! I walked into the common room on Thursday night to eat my dinner and struck up a conversation with two other Mexican girls around my age who had also just met. Soon after, two Austrian girls joined us at the table along with a Spanish guy who was stopping in Cardiff for the night. All of the girls, as it turns out, were in town for the open-air Noah Kahan concert the following night – a fun pit stop in their respective summer itineraries. As the hours of conversation continued, they urged me to check out ticket prices online…and the deal was too good to pass up.
The concert was held just behind Cardiff Castle, on a plot of land in the middle of Bute Park. We queued up in the Friday afternoon sun, playing charades to pass the time. Things turned out even better than expected (as they often do!) when we made it through the entrance. Apparently, the “VIP” tickets with access to the very front rows of the venue had not sold out, so they started to hand out the yellow wristbands that entail access to that area – for free! We couldn’t believe our luck (particularly me, with my last minute purchase) and ended up having the time of our lives in the first few rows of a crowd of hundreds. It never fails to amaze me how fast you can meet people while traveling. After only having known these girls for around 24 hours, I knew not only their names but also the stories behind them, as well as where they grew up, their birthdays, the sports they played when they were younger, the details of their recent break ups, and what they want to do with their lives. Our experiences up to this point could not be more different, but we somehow all ended up with each other for the night. The bright yellow wristband now lives pasted in one of the pages of my notebook, along with museum tickets and maps and other bits of paper that have fallen victim to my scrapbooking 🙂
They had all left by next morning, off to continue their respective journeys. I decided to spend my Saturday morning roaming the beautiful landscape of St. Fagans, a picturesque village on the outskirts of the city that has been turned into an open-air, walkable museum. The museum was recommended to me by some of my interviewees as a site rich in both multilingual signage and Welsh history. The area is home to St. Fagans castle, an Elizabethan manor that served as the Windsor family’s summer home in the late 19th century. You can go inside and visit the various rooms, including the hall, the study, the kitchen, and the butler’s room. The surrounding grounds hold a myriad of historical buildings from different time periods from around Wales, which were completely taken apart and rebuilt here to be on public display. They range from tanneries and farmhouses to chapels and mills. I felt like I was in Bridgerton! I thought a lot about the Windsor family and their daily summer activities. Lady Windsor would likely have taken strolls down to the pond, just as I did, with nothing else to do on a hot June afternoon while she waited for dinnertime. Apparently, she liked to play music from the phonograph in the drawing room after dinner and hold sewing parties with her friends. I think Lady Windsor and I would have gotten along quite well.
Tomorrow is my last day in Cardiff before I head to London for one night and fly to Cape Town the next day. Off to country number two already! Two friends from home and one from Northwestern are in London right now, so I’m going to try to see them before I leave. Enjoy some pictures from my last few days in Cardiff (and shoutout to the lovely gentleman who took my picture with the flag!):
Cardiff Bay
A toddler came up to me and gave me this flower!
Roald Dahl’s childhood church
Cardiff Food & Drink Festival