Excerpts from the Travel Journal: Day Eight--Cardiff
In the morning, we drove to Cardiff, both for the obvious reasons and because I am Welsh way back in my heritage. We parked in a garage next to the Millennium Centre, which was very sci-fi, all fancy tokens. Millennium Centre is way huger than I expected it to be.
It doesn’t look that big on TV. But it was gorgeous.
I loved Cardiff. Of all the places we went, it was the one I could most imagine myself living in.
We tried to see the DW exhibit, but it’s closed for one week this year, and it was the one we were there. Ah, well. We took a bus downtown and ducked into the TI to use the Internet so I could send giddy e-mails. ( jlrpuck said I wasn’t allowed to sing Woe Is Me is all day. arctacuda said I wasn’t allowed to malign Nacho Man ever again.) Once done with the TI, we walked over to this shopping center for the post office. (Could it have been the St. David's Shopping Centre? I think it mght have been.) jlrpuck and arctacuda said the Welsh are clearly my people because they are tiny like me. (arctacuda said I needed to marry the bartender because he was a Hobbit like me. "You look like a pair of gnomes," she said. "It's adorable." DT, meanwhile, towers over me. I think I come up to his chest. "Hey, arctacuda," I remarked, studying the picture, "apparently I'm a tiny person.")
They were doing this cool project in the shopping center where they’re making a photo mosaic so we had our photos taken. “What a gorgeous picture!” gushed one of the photographers. “Come see!” I was the only one who got this special treatment. I think he was flirting with me. We also stopped in a calendar store, which had an entire calendar devoted to Westies on water skis.
We stopped for lunch-I had a jacket potato with bacon and cheese, and some of the bacon was even like American bacon! I blame my sexy hangover for all the bacon I ate that day. It’s brutal, the power of DT’s Sexy. I also had a coconut ice, which basically tasted like melted coconut ice cream-before walking back up to the HRC, where I bought my father a T-shirt. I also ducked into the Borders we passed to buy the Keane CD, and the cashier guy flirted with me, too! “Where’s that beautiful accent from?” he asked me, and I said Boston, and he asked me how long I was in the UK, and I said I was leaving the next day, and he responded, “Aw, bad luck for the UK.” I am apparently the most in-demand girl in the UK.
After the HRC, we took the bus back to Millennium Centre, and, after wandering around a crafts store, retrieved Aloysius. Verity (ha ha ha!) took us home by a different route, and we listened to Radio One as we drove, which was making fun of teachers, which was very mean. The different route was much quicker, so we had time to stop back in Stratford for just a bit more shopping. I went off to put money in the parking meter, and when I got back, arctacuda said to me, “Meat Loaf stopped by. He said he’d do anything for love, but he won’t do that.” I said, “That’s random.” She agreed, “I was trying to think of the most random thing I could say to you.”
We left Stratford one last time, and drove home, where we sadly packed our bags. We’d wanted to shop in Charlecote’s little shop but they lied about its hours. We dragged our suitcases down the narrow, winding staircase and dumped them in the car, and took the garbage out. We had a viewing of the DT photos, just because, and then left a carefully crafted comment in the guest book. Jlrpuck made dinner out of our leftovers, a delicious mushroom-and-cheese omelet and potato pancakes-and then we settled in for our last night.
We watched some weird shows-“Never Mind the Buzzcocks,” “Silent Witness,” “8 out of 10 Cats,” “Star Stories.”