Brilliant

Hey all,
I know it´s been awhile since our last update but fear not, we´ll be unleashing the blogger floodgates within the next few days. Prepare yourself!

So, I´ll fill you in on my last few days of Cardiff. I couldn´t get enough of those arcades! During my time in Cardiff I was lucky enough to stumble across the brilliant Arcardes Project by artist Jenny Savage, an audio work that documented the nature of the Victorian and Edwardian arcades in Cardiff.

How it works is that you get an MP3 player and headphones from the city Visitor´s Centre and listen to pre-recorded tracks that correspond with different arcades as you wander around them. The tracks were an amalgamation of thoughts, feelings, history, anecdotes, etc about specific arcades by shoppers, urban planners, historians, landlords, etc. The idea was to wander around (which I did with a mocha or two), listen, and chill. It was by no means a guided tour, but I learned so much about the function of these indoor shopping streets, and people´s unique relationships with them. I really liked the way the information was being presented - it was sort of like walking through a busy marketplace and getting different voices and perspectives. For instance, I learned that this wig shop is the site of Cardiff´s first gay club during the early 80´s. The audio recording had a dude talking about the club´s decor during that time and him sneaking in to the club when he was 14. These types of stories really personalized the space, especially for a tourist.
More arcade pictures.
Cardiff Central Market, part of the arcades complex and a beautiful Industrial Era building.

Here is the finalized garden we made for the Royal Horiticultural Society show. Every single plant in the garden in edible! The show was a lot bigger than I had expected - there were some amazing plants and gardens there.


Here are some other gardens from the show.


A fellow Canadian in Wales! A bird sactuary had a booth at the show with different birds of prey on display. I got to pet this cutie pie, a Canadian Grey Owl (Amy, are you jealous? ;)
After the garden show a bunch of us Woofers went to the Cardiff Castle, whose website says is over 2000 years old and "has been a Roman Garrison, a Norman stronghold and in Victorian times was transformed into a gothic fairytale fantasy."


The top of the central tower... whose staircases were dangerously narrow and windy.


Since Jules left a day or two ealier than I from Cardiff, I was on my own for a few days and decided to check out Cardiff with the other wwoofers. One particular day we had intended on going to Brecon Beacons, a beautiful-sounding National Park, but time management was not our friend that day so we decided to find something closer and settled on Southerndown Beach, about an hour outside of Cardiff by train. It absolutely floored me. Gorgeous!
Cautiously dangling ourselves over a cliff.






Our lodging situation in Cardiff had us living and working with people from all over: Australia, England, Vietnam, New Zealand - all but Wales! We had a dinner party once and it was a strange revelation that no one at the table of 14 or so people were actually native Welsh. We did get to add some great British words to our vocab though:

Twee (overly cutesy)
Brilliant
Lush (sort of like "cool". Apparently this is a Welsh teenager thing).
Boot (which means the car trunk)
Satsumas (what they call clementines)
Posh (apparently when I attempted a British accent I sounded "So posh!")
Rubbish (I always laugh when I hear this one)
Minging (ugly)
Winge-ing (whining)
Jumper ("sweater" isn´t a word there)
Pants (are underwear, which I think is more of a New Zealand thing)

That´s all for now folks, hope you all are well!