this is a strange place

So, I thought that we had gotten away from not speaking the language, but I guess not. But more on that later.

Grace and I slept in this morning. We were pretty exhausted from our Paris trip yesterday. We looked it up last night, and doing both the Cadbury Chocolate factory tour and Wales just wouldn’t fit in one day. It would have been about nine hours on the train, not leaving any time for the tour. We’re going to try to stop off and see it on our way up to Scotland, since it would only add a couple of hours to the trip.

Matt and Steve got in around noon, I found out this morning (about ten minutes before Grace and I were going to leave) that I needed to stick around to let them in. I thought that they were going to get keys from Seales, like I did, but I found out that Grace and I were the only ones with keys. I kind of assumed that there were one or two more to hand out. I’m kind of glad Seales called, if he hadn’t Grace and I would have been halfway to Cardiff with both the keys to the apartment when they showed up. It wasn’t a huge deal though, there wasn’t anything time critical we wanted to do in Cardiff so we just caught the train that left an hour later than we had originally planned.

Grace and I had a nice walk down Portobello Market, which is right by where the apartments are. Lots of stalls with pretty stuff, we got a few souvenirs and presents for people. Then we caught the tube to Paddington, where we caught the train to Cardiff. It was about three hours on the train. We walked around Cardiff for a while, took a lot of pictures of the castle, but we were too late to get in. Grace and I weren’t sure if we wanted to go in anyhow, it would have been 20 pounds ($40 US) for both of us. We got pictures of another nice, older-looking building but couldn’t figure out what it actually was. We had supper at a Chinese buffet, because we wanted something fast so we could catch the earlier train back to London. We had been planning on getting back to London a little after midnight, but this train (that I’m on right now) will get us back around 10:30. It was a nice, relaxing day. We mainly went just so we could say we went to Wales, and the castle was pretty neat. There’s a jousting tournament on the 20th and 21st, which would be cool to go to but that’s right when we leave. The thing that threw me a bit is that all the signs were in both English and Welsh. It was better than France, where it was just French, but I wasn’t expecting that.

Well, Grace and I are on the train now, should get back to London in about an hour and a half. The BritRail passes we have are nice, we can just hop onto and off of trains as we wish, and the trains are pretty nice too. There’s a little more legroom than in an airplane, there’s food for purchase, and the scenery is nice to watch. Much more convenient for shorter trips than flying, or even driving in some sense. I kind of wish we had more public transportation in the US, some cities have good systems (the trains in Portland were nice) but there’s no good long-distance rail service. I mean, yeah, we have Amtrak, but to take that from Lexington to Grand Rapids we would have to drive 2 hours to the nearest Amtrak station, take a train to Chicago, have a six or seven hour layover in Chicago then catch a train to Grand Rapids. It’s a similar deal getting to Prairie. Sixteen or seventeen hours on the train, and eight or nine in a car. Kind of a no-brainer.

Which brings me to a funny story. In Britain, the trains run on time. You can set your watch by the trains. On our trip from Stonehenge to Bath, some people held up the train by 30 seconds, and they got chewed out pretty good by the conductor. So, we are almost back to London when the train stops, the engineer gets on the intercom and says, in a very annoyed voice “As those of you who take this train regularly know, this is the part of the journey where we sit and wait for the Heathrow Express to get ahead of us. (huge sigh) we should be underway shortly, I apologize for the delay. We would be in Paddington Station in 8 minutes, but we have to wait for the (I could almost hear him swearing under his breath) Heathrow Express.” He said some more stuff, but I didn’t catch it. Then, about three minutes later we start going and the engineer gets back on and announces that the
Heathrow Express has gone past, and we can go. We get in about three minutes late, and you could tell that the engineer was mad when he got on the intercom. That is a far cry from the Amtrak train I was on that got stuck behind a broken freight train and we were at a dead stop for three hours, and I don’t think I even got a sorry.

We should get the equipment tomorrow, and I should actually start working. Until next time.