A Long Walk Home: "Riley still highly smiley"

Alright,

It has been a few days since my last post, and, as I know you are all more anxious for this than all of Germany is for David Hasselhoff's next single (I heard he'll be doing a rendition of "Oops I did it Again...), I apologize.

The last few days have been pretty busy. I generally have class for either one large chunk of time during the day or a few very inconveniently timed blocks during the day, so I haven't had a lot of free time when its sunny out to explore the city... BUT, on Friday I got a few hours so I headed to City Centre! Its a pretty cool place really. There are a lot of just walking streets with shops and pubs and restaurants all over and I spent a little over 2 hours wandering. I ended up seeing some of their port and a church and most of the major streets. I also saw the Dylan Thomas center, and I'll probably end up going back there to check it out pretty soon. There is also a place called Plantasia that looks like a giant greenhouse pyramid with a bright green light at the top. I'm pretty sure its some sort of exhibit thing, but I did see a sign that says children can have their birthday parties there, so it must be fun right! Maybe I'll check it out.

The next day we took a trip put on by the study abroad office to an old coal mine called Big Pit and then later to Cardiff to spend a few hours roaming around the city. Big Pit itself was really cool. We got to take a tour down into the old mine- its no longer operational and heard the history of the mining industry in Britain and the effects of the closing of the mines on all of the surrounding areas. At one point they were mining over 250,000 tons each year out of the Big Pit Mine alone!
After our mine tour we went to Cardiff (the largest city and capital of Wales), where they gave us about 2 and a half hours to walk around and stuff. It was nice to be able to walk around without all of my luggage this time! We walked past a lot of cool stuff including the Cardiff Castle and the Millennium Stadium, which is the National rugby stadium of Wales. I plan on going back and touring the inside of the castle, but since we only had a little bit of time and it costs about 11 pounds, we wanted to have more time to do it. There were so many pedestrian streets filled with shops and cool stores, a few hours wasn't enough. I saw a sweatshirt with Mowgli on it and he was carrying a boom box and it said, "Where's the Jungle?" I thought it was funny.

That night, the bar manager told me they would be playing the Bears/Packers game at the bar on Sunday night and that we should stop in. So a lot of the Americans and a few British people (including my roommate James) went to watch the game. During this time, the manager also told me that he was looking at getting onto the American football team for Wales and he was going to a tryout/practice next Sunday and he invited me and a few other Americans to go with him and help him practice and get ready. It should be a fun time! haha

The first picture here is where I got the title for this post. I found it in this newspaper thing that we can get for free on the bus. It mostly has articles on sports and popular culture but it also has some really funny articles too. One of the articles the other day talked about a British primary (elementary) school that was teaching their kids about World War II and to show the kids how scary it was and what it was like to live back then they showed clips on tv of the Blitzkrieg and said London was being bombed. To cap it all off they sent all of the kids (ages 4-11) into an underground shelter and set off a firework outside. I guess the school got a few angry calls from parents about their children being scared and having nightmares... I suppose I don't really see what is wrong with the whole situation... Either way, there are times when I find myself laughing out loud while reading some of these articles. Riley the smiley dog was a featured article on page 3... and I thought it was great.