even though it was only a 8 hour flight out of toronto to london heathrow, followed by a 2.5 hour train ride from paddington station to cardiff central, it felt like an eternity.
i always had this fascination with Wales and now i'm finally here! it's hard to believe but ya, though this is gonna be a very short trip (one of my shortest to date), i already have multiple plans to revisit the place.
my hotel, the royal hotel cardiff, is just a stones throw (literally) away from the train station so that was a huge relief. the bed is so cozy and all for me...and blu. i rolled from one end of the bed to the other for about 8 hours then woke up at 4 am GST, going downstairs to harass the night staff for a snack. some guy staggered into the lobby semi drunk and very non-brit like. i say that because he had nice teeth and a nice smile...looks like the typical Nordsman, which was nice. i hadn't realized or perhaps i forgot just how nordish the UK folks all looked, and i totally like that about them.
i like how easy it is for me to pick up their accents and before long, i started sounding like a true brit. haha, and that's after being there for a day. some of then were hard to understand and i had to stare at them for a while before it sank in what they were saying, but i'm sure it's likewise with them because darren seemed fascinated with my verbage. it's either the slang or a mixture thereof...or perhaps it's 4 am and he's snoggered.
the people were nice and the welsh accent was also a bit hard to comprehend. at first i thought it was because they were speaking with an old welsh accent but actually it wasn't that at all. as it turned out, the traditional old welsh language was oppressed in the UK up until the 50s so a lot of the older folks don't know how to speak the language and can't pronounce it. i asked an older lady how to pronounce 'Daegian' (it's a name i want to name my daughter, apparently it's old welsh for 'Dawn') but she couldn't say it either for sure. we figured it's prolly di(as in diana)-gi(hard 'g')-an(as in ann). and together her and i figured 'Jolyon' would be a good boy's name for a son. i loved it! the old welsh is so hard to comprehend, it seems as though they don't use any vowels whatsoever, it's all consonents. cardiff was originally 'cardydd', and that at least has some sort of resemblance to 'cardiff'. i figured the 'dd' is pronounced as 'f'. sooo interesting! i love the language, the culture, the traditions.
