Monday we went to Wales. The sun was shining! First we went to Tintern Abbey, my new favorite place. It's a fairly impressive ruin from the outside.
The inside, though, is so hauntingly beautiful. There's something about the fact that is a ruin, that the roof is gone and the outside is covered in lichen, that make the beautiful, airy interior with its grass floor even more remarkable.
After Tintern Abbey we visited a Welsh open-air folk-life museum. There was a castle and gardens and forty other buildings transplanted from around Wales, including a cock-fighting arena (the animal competitors wore spurs and magic charms). My favorite part of the castle was this bushy plant in the rose garden. It's a secret room.
If I lived there, I would spend all my time in the bush. And I would wear makeup and fix my hair if I were going to have my picture taken coming out of the bush, which I did not do here. [Note: I always put my sunglasses up on my head like that and then my curls wrap around the glasses and I have to spend several minutes pulling my hair out of the glasses. I'll be bald if I keep it up.]
And then we got trapped in Cardiff, because I'm not such a good navigator and it was rush hour and British roundabouts are rubbish. We did eventually escape and made our way to Caerphilly to eat dinner in sight of the castle, Britain's second largest after Windsor. Word on the street is that it's haunted.
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6 comments:
Tintern Abbey was my favorite. I may have bought a souvenir there on the sabbath and now I don't even remember what souvenir I bought, but I do remember I bought it on a Sunday because it was the only day I was going to be in Wales. That'll teach me.
P.S. Did you remember to buy a student driver plaque for the car, so that other drivers would forgive your American driving ways?
I hope you're not going to come home saying things like "brilliant" and "rubbish" just because you've lived in jolly old England for a few weeks!
(I won a prize from the library--so I guess there's another upside to your trip)
I hope you wrote a poem while at Tintern Abby. And I think you should say rubbish all the time.
Moo--We thought about getting the student driver thing, but that would have involved going to a gas station and the fewer places we have to go, the better. We're getting better!
SCS--Oh, yeah, I'm totally going to British it up from now on and I'm going to refer to my stay here as the time when I LIVED here. And I'm going to name my kids Nigel and Fiona.
Eliana--It's an excellent word, isn't it?
I'm so behind in your blog! (End of summer--you know.) I love Tintern Abbey. It is so beautiful! My English majorness is saying there's a poem about it or near it. I must look it up now. Love your pictures of it.
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