Hello! It is Saturday morning here in Swansea!

I am writing this from my new humble abode. It truly is very humble. We moved into Hendrefoelan Student Village Wednesday night. To put it frankly, this place is no Ritz. Or Penmaen (our home for the previous two weeks). It is also a lot farther away from everything, we are 2.5 miles away from our campus, which means about 5 miles away from city centre which is a big bummer because we could easily walk along the beach to downtown when we were on campus. There are eight rooms in my house, three on the first floor, four on the second floor, and one on the third floor. We all will be sharing two toilets, two showers, and one bath; all separate. We have a kitchen which is nice but a bit dirty so far because one of our roommates from China, Tomas, was living here by himself and is a tad messy. Three others of us have moved in so we are going to ask him to please clean up his stuff as well as to please shut the toilet door when he is in there. My current other roommates are Courtney (who I had pre-sessional with and love) and Yushi a first year from Winchester, England who also seems really nice. Partying is really big here, possibly bigger than at Iowa so it is a bit intimidating for me. People seem pretty respectful of me not really wanting to go out and I do hang out with everyone until they leave for the clubs. These next nights though are supposed to be super crazy and just pure partying, we have a week off before school starts, I think solely for this purpose... okay, that is a bit cynical, they do have events going on during the day but not comparable to the night activities. So that being said, I am hoping that once everyone realizes how much of their budget is going towards alcohol they will join me in some board games or something... I should probably work on something more exciting for us to do than that, it's a work in progress.
This week flew by! Our class finished on Thursday... which seems crazy. We are getting three semester hours for this course and have a 2500 word paper due a week from Monday. My topic is the cultural and political influences on the music of the 1960's so I am actually pretty excited to start it... which I will be doing later today.
On Wednesday we took our third and final field trip to Bath. Bath was beyond beautiful. I am really bummed that we didn't get any longer there than we did because there was a surprising amount of interesting stuff to do there.

We went into the Roman Baths which were amazing, thinking about how old everything was, including the natural water, stone floors, etc. It was really neat walking where the Romans had walked and just really impressive how they laid out the whole system with the natural hot spring, the cooling down pool, the drain and so on. We got a walking audio tour with it which was really helpful and made it a bit more enjoyable than just wandering around aimlessly.

Bath Abbey in the background, Roman Baths below, standing on Terrace

Jane Austen lived in Bath and mentions it in many of her novels so we went to do her museum but it cost way more than we had allotted as did the Fashion Museum which houses Queen Victoria's wedding gown. There is a day trip back to Bath in November so I think we will do that and do what we didn't get to do Wednesday. All of the buildings are beautiful and the same stone color, it is pretty touristy but we wandered a bit and found some unique places and there are lots of little alleyways filled with cute shops. 

Inside of Bath Abbey

So then yesterday after we semi-settled into our new home, Alex, Adam, Kyle, Alison and I went on a day trip to Carmarthen. I had previously read about Carmarthen as having been the birthplace of Merlin and Kyle's two older brothers studied there ten or so years ago. It was a short train ride away so we wandered the town a bit and looked at the Uni. All of us are very appreciative to be at Swansea because while some locals ask us why we would ever choose Swansea we can now all say, well, we could have been at Carmarthen. They also have a partial castle and I know it is getting bad when I am so nonchalant about seeing a castle in another city centre. Wales is, after all, the land of the castles.  We ate at a small local pub which was probably the most enjoyable. I have been pleasantly surprised by the vegetarian options in being that there is always at least two. We wandered a bit more around the town and then took the train back.

We don't have anything too exciting going on this weekend so it should be pretty low key. I am looking forward to that. Coming up is Rome and Alison and I have been practicing our Italian, very poorly but hopefully we can manage. We are also all planned for Berlin, room and travel, there are at least 15 of us going on this trip, so I am excited that people wanted to go! I am currently working on organizing a trip to Dublin mid-November so there is no shortage of planning going on! Sorry once again for the length and any needless information, I hope you are enjoying reading this! 

Cheers, Julia

Rain rain go away

Well hello all of you who read this blog!
Today has been a very long day to say the least. One of our friends is an avid hiker and decided to get a group of us to go to Brecon Beacons to see the waterfalls of Wales. We left at 10 am and got back at 4:30 pm with two hours of bus riding and transferring. It was really beautiful but it was, of course, the only day that we have had thus far with non-stop rain. Needless to say, it was very very wet and very chilly.

After we returned tired and soaking we all showered and went out to try out first Indian buffet. Alison and I discovered four in half a block so we figured at least one of them had to be tasty. We tried our luck with the cheapest one, after all, we are college students. It was good but once again very surprising because the 12 of us were the only people in the restaurant. They don't serve raita here which is very disappointing to me but it was still hot food which was necessary. 

Going backwards now... Yesterday we had a really nice day! A few of us got up for breakfast (yogurt and cereal on Saturday and Sunday) and then traveled into town for some morning shopping. Saturday's are the best in Swansea. Everyone comes out for the market. We went to the 99p store which is easily one of the best discoveries of our time here so far. As you guessed, everything is 99p. EVERYTHING. It is amazing... After I got some laundry detergent, for 99p, I wanted to find a travel book for Berlin so the bookstore was right next store. There was a nice coffee shop inside which is the first one we have found so that is also pretty exciting. Once finished purchasing, we ventured to the market with knowledge of what to buy and what to avoid. Welsh cakes are simply the best things. One we got back Adam decided he wanted to go explore the castle in the city centre, where we just were. We took an hour break and headed back into town. We were definitely tourists at this point taking pictures of the ruins but it is not every day you see a castle. I climbed up on it to get some stellar photos but the police came over to me and I explained that I was an American and this is how we do things, kidding. I got down. (The Welsh police do not carry guns and wear neon vests so to me they just look like crossing guards.) 

Alison, Kyle, Me, Adam, Jacqueline, Maggie and Jen at the castle

We then wandered a bit more and remembered Swansea was playing and some of the group hadn't eaten yet so we went to a pub; of course the game wasn't being televised so that was kind of a bust. I don't think we did too much last night, which ended up being a good thing, preparation for today's events. 

This week is our second, and last, week of class. The class has been fun so far, a nice transition period from not having class to going to a full Welsh load in two weeks. We are going to Bath on Wednesday so I am really excited for that! It should be a good and fun week if it is anything like the past week!
Until another day!
Tada!

Settling into Swansea

My mother reminded me that I hadn't posted in a while but I feel like nothing terribly exciting has happened! Everything is still going wonderfully and I am loving all of it all of the time. I am just going to try and go from where I last left off but things are starting to blend together...

After our semi-wild night Saturday we had a very mellow Sunday. I think barely five people made it to breakfast and nearly everyone that even went to breakfast spent the morning alone. Alone time is something very near and dear to my heart so it was nice to have a little time. I can't really think of what we did the rest of the day but I am guessing we went into town or something like that... Oh yes we did! Alison, Hannah, Courtney, and I had a lovely afternoon looking around town. We also decided to have a fancy night out in preparation for a meager budget the rest of the week. We went to an italian restaurant, Ask, in main Swansea. There was absolutely no one out. Speaking of which, everything here has really odd hours and it has been one of the hardest things to adjust to. Nearly everything closes at 5 on the weekday and it doesn't stay open later on the weekend. In fact, Tesco (our supermarket god-send store) closes at 4 pm on Sunday's. So for our dinner there was one other couple in this restaurant; the restaurant was recommended to us by a local so we thought we would try it. For anyone other than my father eating PB&J every day gets a little monotonous. I had a delicious veggie pizza and Alison ordered a margherita pizza which we soon discovered is none other than a cheese pizza here. Hannah and Courtney ordered pasta, we had plenty of leftovers for a meal the next day which was very exciting for us! I am not sure what we did the rest of the night... the nights kind of blend the most because we all hangout for a while and some people drink and play games, others just sit and talk/write for a while, and eventually we part our ways later and go to bed. For example, everyone tonight did their own thing for a while and we then played drinking games/cards until a group parted for Oceana (big club) at 10. The rest of us then hung out for a bit more before getting very tired...
Sleep has been interesting here but is getting better every day... and today we had a long day so everyone was tired. More on that in a bit...

So then... Our class started on Monday! It was a little strange to be in class and actually having to listen to a professor because it seems like so long ago, and it was, that I was in class. It is a class on British culture and politics so it should be a really nice introductory course to life in Swansea. The purpose of the course is to ease us into all the small differences, or big differences in some cases, of our lives here for the next three or so months (three or four students will be staying the whole semester). For about half of the day the group of 31 will all be together and then the rest of the time is divided into four groups. Each group ultimately has all the same course material but some days I have class for three hours and other days I have seven. It is quite sad to find out how little I actually know about happenings here but it is fun to learn. We watched a film, Passport to Pimlico, on Monday. It was made in 1949 and deals with rationing cards and the government etc. It was a bit hard to follow because there accents were so thick but we all felt to get the general gist. Tomorrow our professor is going to give us advice about how to make the best of our time here, i.e. what clubs to join, what trips to take, best deals.

St Fagans Post Office

Today was our second field trip, we have a third next Wednesday. We went to Big Pit which is a coal mining museum in southern Wales, it was about an hour and a half bus ride from the Uni. The mine was shut down in 1980 and the majority of industry in Wales was coal so clearly they have suffered in recent decades. We took a tour down into the mine, wearing head lamps with special batteries and no other electronics so as not to cause an explosion. Very intimidating. It was really interesting, a 50 minute, one mile tour, into the depths of Wales. I found out how very lucky I am to live now, our guide told us that young children from the age of six were sent down into the mines for 12 hours and they sat in total darkness the entire time. Their parents couldn't afford candles thus they had no light. Also quite sad was the fact that they used horses in the mines; at the age of four a horse was taken into the mine and did not ever go back out. They spent the rest of their lives in darkness, eventually went blind, died and were buried in the mines. Needless to say it was not a cheery visit except for the view from the top of the town built up around the mine with a backdrop of rolling hills covered with some purple flowering plant.
After this we hopped back into the bus to travel 40 or so minutes to St Fagans Natural History Museum. There we toured an open air museum of what Wales would have been like back in the day. There was a castle which had beautiful gardens (they were slightly wilted...) and a town with a tannery, bakery, saw mill and so on. It was nice to see but we had two hours here which was a little too long.

St Fagans Castle

After getting back we were all very hungry, made dinner (I baked my 50p Tesco pizza), and hung out... Losing my train of thought because one of my friends just came in to talk about trips and he is really stressed about it! Everyone wants to travel and there are so many ideas about where to go so it is really easy to get overwhelmed. I can't remember if I already wrote that we signed up for our school trip to Paris or not... so we did that. Plus today we booked flights to Berlin for the third week in October for the Berlin Light Festival which looks amazing. Rome is coming up the first weekend in October so I am super anxious for that but am definitely just enjoying my time exploring the wonders of Wales!

Alison, me, and Courtney at Big Pit in front of the Cage!

I think that is all for now! Tada!

Out on the Towns

Writing again soon... I don't think I will be doing as much as soon as these first two weeks are over! Yesterday afternoon we took a bus out to the Gower Peninsula which was absolutely beautiful. It was about an hour away and we went through some very rural areas. I sat by a German student named Fabian... he is really great. We didn't get as much as time as was necessary to explore the path and the area but it was still a really nice afternoon. Then after that we went down to the city centre to Tesco (Wal-Mart ish but better) for some groceries and necessities. It was also one of the girls 20th birthday so seven of us went out to dinner and we found a nice place offering 50% off main dishes so we were very pleased with ourselves. We are still adjusting to the time change; I was up last night from 2 am to 3 am which was slightly frustrating so we are all staying up later tonight.
This morning a group of us went to breakfast and planned out our afternoon at Mumbles. Alison, Adam and I decided not to go back to bed and went downtown to do a little shopping and to go to the Swansea Market. There were a ton of people out so it was fun to see the city a little more alive than it had been, and the sun was shining which felt like a mini miracle. We decided to try out a few Welsh delicacies... namely laverbread. This is really unexplainable... it is like seaweed trying to be bread... it was just awful. To save our taste buds we got Welsh cakes which were, thankfully, delicious. Welsh cakes are some combination of scones and pancakes with currents and sugar dusted on them. There was also a ton of fresh seafood, meat, and lots and lots of fruit! We are planning on going whenever possible.
Then this afternoon we had a huge group go out to Mumbles which is a nearby village just around the bay from Swansea. It was the best weather we have had since we have been here... which I guess is not saying a lot, but it was sunny and around 65 degrees. We visited our first castle, Oystermouth Castle, which was built by the Normans. It was really pretty and there was an older gentleman who gave us information about the castle as well as relaying the message that there was a hurricane headed for the UK. (We found out his information on this was not the most accurate though...) For lunch we went to Joe's ice cream shoppe and sat on the stone wall next to the beach looking out at the bay. I would have to say that this might end up being one of my favorite memories.

This evening was our pub crawl... we went to Divas, an on campus club for two and a half hours and it was just the 28 of us or so US (plus German, plus Dutch) students so it was really fun. We tried to go to two other places, one being the second biggest club in the UK but it was getting late and things were a smidge bit unorganized... But for now that is all! Sorry again about the length!

Connecting to Wales

Well, here I am!

It has been a long 48ish hours! I flew out of Cedar Rapids on Wednesday at 1:35 pm and arrived in Detroit an hour and a half later, and left again at 7:00 pm for London Heathrow! My flight was mostly enjoyable to London, although I was literally in the middle of the plane next to two larger men. I didn't sleep on the plane, which in retrospect was a very poor decision, oh well, all is well that ends well. So after finally getting off the plane it was 7:30 am London time... I got to wait in line through the UK border for an hour and a half! And I was supposed to meet up with Alison to take the Heathrow Express to Paddington and then Paddington to Wales at 10:45 am so I felt like I was really late and I was feeling very tired and hungry. The actual process of getting through the border was super easy and I just showed my passport and my acceptance letter from Wales and waltzed on through... lugging behind me two suitcases and a backpack, looking as my mother had told me not too, "very green." So then began the process of getting from terminal 4 to terminal 1 where Alison was... it didn't take too long but I was really fearful of not finding here because somehow my ipod went from 100 % to 0 % in a matter of an hour and then internet cost 10 pounds... Ultimately I did find a very relieved Alison in a corner trying to use a nice man's internet to contact me as well! As we were waiting for the Heathrow Express I of course got my second bloody nose of the trip and a young guy came over and asked me if it was the air or if I had gotten in a fight and so we chatted for a bit and he laughed when he understood I was american because with my bloody nose I sounded British, already getting my accent! From there we took the 15 minute train to central London to get the next train to Swansea. Everything went well with tickets and we had an hour to spare. From London to Swansea was a three hour train ride which we slept the majority of and found another guy who was going to Swansea University as well!

Getting to the University was pretty simple from the train, we just hopped in a cab; had a very nice driver who showed us all the good places to eat and drink... there is a street called Wind Street that on the weekend you cannot drive down because there are literally 20,000 people there drinking in one of the 40 pubs... we are touring there tomorrow night with a group so that will definitely be an interesting experience for me. When we got to the U we immediately got our housing for the next week and a half, it is in the middle of campus and we each have our own room and all of the pre-sessional students are staying together so it is really nice. I can also see the ocean, if it is not too foggy, from my window. The bathrooms are teeeny and the shower makes you feel very claustrophobic, as well as each time I use it my bathroom floor is flooded. Makes you very appreciative of the size of our American things. After saying hello to a few students, a few from Colorado, North Carolina, one from Tennessee, Massachusetts etc. Alison and I went to dinner at the pub on the pond, which was pretty good but truly after eating nothing all day anything would have tasted wonderful. Sadly after that, it was only 6:15 pm but both us of were super exhausted so we said we would go to our rooms and hang out for a bit but I was asleep after 10 minutes and woke up to a wild party outside of our dorm; we found out this morning that there are some high schoolers here for a visit for a week or so. I slept until 2 am and was up for an hour before falling back asleep until morning! Clearly traveling is very exhausting and I didn't even feel like it was that taxing.

...I apologize for the length of this blog and promise not all of them will go on this much...

This morning our floor mates (about 10 of us) went to find this free breakfast we had been promised and we found a free breakfast but were not certain it was for it because it was all the high schoolers from the previous night. We all got to know each other a bit and all of us come from varying places with varying majors; another girl is  from Austin, one from Notre Dame, who will live with Alison in the Student Village, and another guy from Chicago. Then today we had a brief orientation to our class that starts on Monday and we are getting registered today, in 10 minutes. Then this afternoon we are taking a small trip to the Gower Peninsula and then one of the girls' birthday is today so we are all going to go out to dinner and to Tesco (their equivalent of a Wal-Mart to grab some groceries and soap...)
All is well and today has been a really great day; hopefully a preview of how life will be here on the other side of the pond.