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!