Our weekend in Wales often depended on the kindness of strangers. Like, for realz, the Welsh are the nicest people ever. They are just friendly in general, and on more than one occasion did someone offer to help us find where we were going or tell us which bus stop we should be at. And they only laughed a little bit when we tried to pronounce something in Welsh ("Um, yes, we need to get to Tongwynlais, please?")

On Thursday night at formal dinner, everyone was really excited because classes were over for the week and we were all getting ready to go off to various cities for the 3-day weekend. A group of about 15 went to Amsterdam. Several people went to Barcelona. A few took day trips to London. Anyways, that night Stevens came up to the 4 of us who were going to Cardiff (Ali, Cristina, Haley, and me) and said, "You know there's a huge storm about to hit Wales, right? Yeah, everyone is calling it the 'First Storm of the Season.'" We were just like, "Then what do you call all this rain we've been having everyday since we got here?!" "Oh, that was nothing. This is like semi-hurricane." Well, this was obviously not good news to us, but the rain didn't end up affecting us too much. Friday morning, our first train was cancelled because of flooding in South Wales, but we just took another line about 30 minutes later. When we got to Cardiff, we walked to our B&B to check in. Then we went out to find somewhere to eat lunch. We were feeling very American/hungry, so we all ordered pizzas, which were delicious. That afternoon, since it was raining off and on, we decided to do something indoors. We went to the National Museum & Gallery. I'm not gonna lie, they were pretty pathetic. The museum part was full of exhibits about the rock formations that created Wales and all these prehistoric plastic animals and stuff. The gallery upstairs was somewhat better. There were a few lovely Welsh landscapes. And they had a room devoted to French masterpieces with a few Monets and Cezannes. Once we left there, we thought we would go check out the cathedral that the guy working at our B&B had said was just a 25 minute walk away. Translation: 2 miles, mostly uphill. We didn't realize how far away it actually was until we were already halfway, so by that time we just kept going. When we got there, we looked around outside and then went in to rest our legs. We intended to just sit for a few minutes, but we ended up being there for the evening service. By the time we left, it was pouring down rain and didn't stop the entire way back to the B&B. We were so exhausted that we stayed in that night and went to bed early.

On Saturday, we got up and had an amazing breakfast down in the dining room. Our plan for the day was to visit a couple of the castles in the nearby area. We walked into the city center and caught a bus. The first place was called Caerphilly Castle. It was enormous and had this vast moat around it. Most of that castle was ruins, but there were still towers you could climb up and halls you could go into. Then we got on the bus again and rode to Castle Coch. That one was very nice because of all the paintings on the walls and ceilings. When we left there, we got the bus back into Cardiff. We went back to the B&B to take naps and then out to dinner. We intended to go back to the B&B just to hang out before going to find a pub or something- in reality, we stayed in again, watched How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days on television, and went to bed. I think we all agreed that it was a great end to our girls' weekend.

This morning, we chatted with some of the other B&B guests over breakfast and then checked out of our rooms. We walked through the city a bit before going to the train station to come back to Oxford. Nobody else was back from their trips when we returned this afternoon, and there were only about 10 of us total at dinner. It will be interesting to see how everybody else's trips went.

In closing, my weekend in Wales has taught me that I should live in a castle one day. That is all.