Author Archives: dogpossum

i went to st fagans (pronounced “saint faggans”) yesterday, and it was mighty fine. and mighty big. it’s a lot like port arthur in tasmania: the grounds are basically historically accurate recreations of houses and their contents. but st fagans pisses all over port arthur as it covers about 90 million more years than port arthur. the central feature is st fagans castle. or rather, the big house built on the site of the former castle. dotted around the landscape are a range of houses from different historical periods.

there was a fair bit of walking involved, but it was nice walking… this pic is of a couple of buildings (whose names i can’t remember or figure out). note the green expanses.

Continue reading “st fagans: welsh life museum”

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that’s cardiff in not-welsh. i’m facinated by welshie talk. full of w’s and andy’s dd’s and ll’s. i like saying words with ‘ll’.

that photo there is of Castle St in Cardiff. it’s one of the main tourist spots, and runs perpendicular to st mary street, which the markets are on. there really is a castle. it’s right there, on the left, behind that big stone wall. i will go there later this week.

Continue reading “Caerdydd”

provider of welsh cakes.

an entertaining photo-essay on one of my favourite welsh things: the cardiff markets.

Continue reading “ah, the markets”

today the weather is amazing. but i’m inside. the weather’s been pretty good, except for saturday, and the day goes on forever: 10pm and it’s still light. i am having no trouble falling asleep, though, as i tire myself out with walking all day.

yesterday i went to st fagans university of welsh life. i took a bunch of irritating tourist pictures, which i will upload for your no doubt excited perusal. ah, travelling alone: the photos are so exciting!
i have also taken some snaps of cardiff. you will love them too.

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the keep in the middle of cardiff castle.

i did both cardiff castle and castle coch today, both belonging to the relatively eccentric bute marquis, who was Scottish, obsessed with historical recreations, and decided he’d like to have a few restored medieval castles. cardiff castle was a bit on the tacky side, if you ask me.

Continue reading “29 June 04: castles”

“tarrah!” instead of seeya
“never!” instead of you’re kidding?
“mate” instead of… mate.

well, i arrived here in the uk yesterday at about 6:20am, after hours and hours on the plane (24 or so). i slept about6 hours on the last leg, came here to a wonderful, sunny day, and fell asleep at 2pm, ostensibly for a quick nap. 12 hours later i wake up. and i go back to sleep. and i get up again at 6am.
aw yeah.
that sleep is some good shit. woke up feeling awesomely good.
and launched my attack on cardiff. i still feel good, but now i’m pretty tired.

wales totally rocks. and i STILL totally love the welsh.
today i’ve had a great many conversations with strangers, most of whome have tried to help me a lot. and i LIKE it.

tomorrow i take on the castle. and then the breacon beacons. and then … hm. more welsh stuff.

yay wales!

ok, so i’m a complete tight-arse. too tight to pay for a hair cut or colour. so i cut my own hair (very excellently, with more enthusiasm than… well, anything other than randomness). and i get The Squeeze to colour it.
now, i’d thought his inability to get it right last time was just inexperience. so i figured i’d give him another go.

sunday afternoon, i’m half covered in bright red colour and he mentions that his colour blindness means that he can’t really tell which bits of my hair he’d coloured already. it seems he was just ‘getting it all wet’, or ‘colouring in the blonde/light bits’.

right.

so i did the front bit again myself. who knows what the back looks like. who cares. but the front is still crappy.

lesson: colour blindess has wider consequences than those particular to the realm of website design.

so now doc flower says it’s not asthma. if it was, i’d have made a postitive response to the steroids.
oh well.
now she thinks it’s a post-viral cough. right. ok

i’ve decided to just pretend it’s not there, and to go on about my business as usual. i’ve had enough of being ill. i’ll think about it when i get back.

today i went to buy some sexy athletic shoes. no joy. they’re all baby blue or white, which i’m not comfortable with. so i’m delaying.
meanwhile, i need to redo the front bit of my hair. and watch more Buffy!

well, i’m still coughing my lungs up, but dr flowers says it’s nasty asthma, provoked by the chest cold thing. so i’m on a millon different inhalers, and had a few days on steroids.
i’ve not noticed any vast improvements, but we’ll see what she says tomorrow.

i leave day after tomorrow, so i’ve been fussing over travel things. all i’ve got left to do is get some travellers cheques/cash in foreign money and a uk/sweden adaptor my electrical goodies and possibly check out some sandshoes. the sandshoes are a luxery.
then out i’m flying! meanwhile, i’ve neglected this blog for freeswingpress, which is going well, aside from some minor technical issues on the main index. ho hum. the lovely marcus is assisting me in what is proving to be the Most Annoying Bug Ever.

my next challenge is to make it so that the search on fsp only searches fsp entries, rather than the dogpossum ones as well. right. i’ll get onto that right now.

heh.