5 hours to my next train and no place to store my duffle bag...

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(Luckily there is free wifi nearby. This is the first of 3 Wales entries; just pretend that this is dated for Monday.)

…he was in a part of Britain like none he had ever known before: a secret, enclosed place with powers hidden in its shrouded centuries…
“The Grey King” by Susan Cooper

Readers, this place is incredible.

I walk the streets gaping; I spend my train or bus rides glued to the window, frantically taking pictures despite the locals laughing at me.


Booking cheap trains in advance means that sometimes I get stuck with a departure time that is less than ideal. For instance, my train left Chester at approximately 6:50 am. That’s 20 minutes earlier than the departure time of the train I use to get to work.

But it was worth it, because it meant watching the sunrise over the misty green fields of Wales’ northern shore. Complete with dozing sheep, thin layer of ground fog right out of a supernatural film and blazing pink sky over the Irish Sea.

Wales has more than a few stereotypes to its name. Among them: farms, sheep, more sheep, friendly provincial townsfolk, green fields, gray stone or brightly painted houses and more sheep.






There is a joke that Wales has more sheep than people. I haven’t seen enough of the countryside to tell if it’s true, but I think today I saw enough sheep to equal at least the population of Cardiff. None seem to show up in my first pictures though, so you’ll just have to take my word for it for now.

These were taken on my bus ride from the train station to the bunkhouse where I’m staying (more on that later, but it’s great).


These mountains are the very edge of Snowdonia national park. Stereotypically rural, sprinkled with small gray villages of narrow streets and friendly people; with impossibly small and hedge-lined winding lanes, a cliff or open space over spectacular valleys; mountains that seem to swallow you up when you drive through them… this place has to be experienced to be understood. Once we got into the park, I actually forgot to take pictures, it was so intense.

The people are so friendly, too. Everyone seems to know each other. Several times in our trip (which took a couple hours and traveled quite a distance) the bus driver would honk at someone in the street and shout out the window; in the few places where we stopped for a few minutes, someone would jump on the bus just to chat with him, often in Welsh.

Readers, I have heard many different languages. I’ve been in a tiny shop surrounded by people speaking Czech, sang long choir songs in Polish, had students swear at me in Korean, stumbled my way through French, heard my landlady and her family yell at each other in Portuguese and seen Irish Gaelic on signs, but I have never heard anything that sounds quite like Welsh.

To sum it up as best I can: Welsh is writing that means nothing like what we expect it to mean and many unusual sounds spat out in a very short period of time.

But it’s fun to listen to. And luckily I have enough maps to SHOW bus drivers where I’m going instead of tell them. Take this hostel, for example, called “Braich Goch” and pronounced like someone trying to clear a piece of popcorn from in his/her throat.

Lovely place though. My room is small, but nice.


And this is the view out the window:


I have the room to myself, but the rest are filled with students and chaperones for an English school trip. In America, that would sound like hell on a stick, but here even the 17-18 year olds are friendly and considerate, at least to foreign strangers.

Also having Obama as president means I encounter SIGNIFICANTLY less Anti-Americanism than I did the last time around.


This is the view when you first step out the front door. Not kidding.

Okay. Say this word:

Machynlleth

Now go here to find out how it’s pronounced.

I know. I think they did that just to be able to weed out the foreigners so that they could…be nice to us anyway? This was a place I pointed to on the map to bus drivers. They still laughed at me though.

'Mach…un…lleth.'
'Machynlleth.'
'Yours sounds wetter. Like German. Achtung! Achtung! Machynlleth!'
'Machynlleth.'
'See, yours does sound wetter. Sploshier. I expect all Welsh babies dribble a lot.'

To be fair, it’s a useful word to know how to say, because if you’re ever choking, you can just say “Machynlleth” and poof! Airway cleared, problem solved.

Luckily, my hostel was near a tiny village called “Corris” which is much easier to pronounce.


Lovely place, but not a lot that’s useful here, save a post office open for two hours every day and a pub that only operates on Sunday mornings.

All in all this place is lovely, and I’m so excited to be here. Cader Idris tomorrow. We drove past it on the way to the hostel, and it DWARFED everything around it. No joke. As described in the books that inspired me to come out here (“The Dark is Rising” sequence, 4th book quoted above, highly recommended), it has a tendency to dominate and intimidate from miles away.

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Comments

[anonymous]

Wow!! Amazing pictures! I'm actually finally reading the Grey King. Now Ill have a visual :)

[Julia]

The pub is only open on Sunday mornings? Haha. Only in Britain. Just caught up with your blog during my lunch break - great pictures and some very entertaining stories!

[Skypaday]

Thank you! Those books are fantastic. Have you read the first 3 or did you start with that one?