Backblogs: Friday in Wales

Sleeping in a room with 5 other guys, all of whom want to get up at different times, led to a massive glut of MIDI tones Friday morning. Despite the short night, we all clamored out of the bedroom into the nicest bathrooms of anywhere we’ve been so far, including the IES center.

Packed and ready, we met our bus about two blocks from the hostel and headed for the Museum of Welsh Life. Museum is really the wrong word for it, its more like a historical village with various buildings set up the way they would have been in various times in Welsh history. Reasonably interesting, but it grew old fast, and we had more than enough time to kill.

The grounds were gorgeous and the day was nice, which made everything better, even if the castle was so poorly misnamed we were looking for it only to find out we were in the dead center of it. We hit a Tesco SUPERSTORE on the way out of Cardiff to grab lunch we could eat on the way. It was sort of a cross between Sam’s Club (Size of store and prices) and a gas station convenience store (type of things sold). Everyone piled back in the bus and we embarked on the first of our long bus journeys.

Hours later, we arrived at Big Pit Mine, which was an active mine until the 1980s but is now the National Coal Museum. We suited up, miners’ hats and all, and headed down 300 feet into the dark, cold, maw of the earth. Our guide was a former miner who had worked in Big Pit, which made for a really cool experience. Ryan and I bore the worst of the tour, he worse than I, since the average height of the passage ways was, without hyperbole, 5’6’’ at the very highest. Both of us spent much of the trip hunched over trying to follow the feet of the people in front of us.

The coal industry has never been known as “child friendly” but the Brits had it much worse than the US kids did, hence why most of the child protection laws came from the UK. At one point, the guide showed us the place the youngest kids would work. Kids as young as 5-6 were assigned to open a large door so that carts could be passed through. However, if the kids were unable to afford a light (candles at the time), they were simply tied to the door and told to listen for knocks. To demonstrate, he had us all turn off our lamps to see what the kids would have seen for 16-18 hours a day:

Nothing

I’ve never been in a place so dark in my life. I couldn’t see my hand in front of my eyes, I stretched out my arm and drew it towards me to see at what distance I could finally make out my own hand and I hit myself in the nose. No lies.

We ended the tour on the very coal face itself, which afforded basically no room to stand, or really even to do much of anything but crouch. The guide said workers basically didn’t move for hours on end while working the face, which means doing EVERYTHING there. Really unpleasant. Around the time he started talking about mining disasters I mentally added Coal Miner to my List of Things I Won’t Do, Even If I Can’t Get Into Grad School.

Once we reemerged and remembered what sunlight was like, we packed back into the bus and headed for Pembrokeshire on the Welsh Coast.

Sometime along the drive, it began to rain softly, which stayed with us basically until we got back to London. Nevertheless, I spent the hours staring out the window at the lush countryside. It reminded me of New Zealand with its rolling hills, craggy rocks, and stone fencings cutting scars across the distant planes. Sheep were everywhere, which provided a great fallback in case whatever I was reading became less interesting than the very existence of sheep. This happened frequently.

The hostel in Pembrokeshire was…not as nice as Cardiff. Serviceable, and they provided three meals, but I would have traded for a working shower and a bed that didn’t make me want to sleep on the floor. It was stashed away in the corner of a small town on the very edge of Wales, so a few of us decided to explore a bit after dinner.

We found The Galleon, the most authentic pub I’ve been to yet. Brains is the local fare, so we all sat down with a pint of it and watched the end of a rugby match. Close to the end of the game this conversation too place

Local Woman: Where are you from?

Tom: We’re from the US, but we’re studying in London

LW: How long will you be here?

Tom: In Wales? Till Sunday, but we leave here tomorrow.

LW: Well! You’d all better get drinking then!

I’ve been told that she made an attempt to get his phone number after I left, but I can’t prove it. With Hey Jude! blaring on the jukebox, a few of us decided to walk back along the beach in the dark. I love dark beaches, when you can barely see a thing and only the sound of the sea pouring onto shore tells you where you are. In a town with very few lights and no latent light pollution, it was really something.

We joined the group for a long game of Catchphrase, followed by late night British TV. I had fully intended to head to bed around 12, but got waylaid by several conversations with various people on the trip, which I don’t mind one bit.

However, the last two hours of my inadvertent delay were spent debating the pros and cons of US sex offender laws compared to comparable laws in the UK with three drunk Welsh youth workers. I’m not going to say I regret it, because it was fun, it was a cultural experience, and, in its absurdity, it was hilarious. However, it was another short night in a run of them. Thank goodness for being able to sleep on the Bus!