Cardiff Bus Tour

Saturday was an opportunity to take a trip around Cardiff with new friends. My flatmate Stefi invited me to come along with some friends she had already met (fellow Greeks students and some of their roommates) and we all loaded onto a red double decker open top tour bus outside Cardiff Castle.

Our bus, outside Cardiff Castle

International Students: New friends

The castle is interesting because it's an amalgam of several different styles based on the histories of the various peoples who have invaded Wales over the years. The front of the castle is divided in the center, with one half in the Roman style and one half in the Victorian gothic. Inside is another castle in the Norman tradition.

The Left Side...

…and the Right.

NO, we didn't drive the tour bus into the Castle. Don't be ridiculous. We couldn't even see over the wall from our seats on the bus. You'll just have to wait for me to collect my Castle Key card (a 3 year access pass into the Castle for Cardiff residents) and go to the Country Faire this upcoming saturday.

We did, however, need to entertain ourselves while we waited for the bus to depart, hence the mini history lesson.

There are quite a lot of international students in Cardiff, as I've mentioned earlier, and over the past few days I've met almost everyone but Americans. Many, many, many Greeks, some British, some Chinese,  some from the Caribbean, some from Africa, a Slovenian, a girl from Spain, a girl from Turkey… If I wanted an international experience, this is it.

Unfortunately, its been such a whirlwind of people I'm having difficulty remembering faces, let alone names. I suppose once classes start and people have something to do other than get together for social events, I'll start to see who I actually encounter regularly and perhaps get better at actually meeting people, not just nodding at them while we try to communicate through the barrier of language and extremely noisy and chaotic environments. Nevertheless, people seem very nice.

Anyway, back to the tour.

We saw many of the beautiful buildings in the city center as we drove around… the National Museum, the University, the Welsh government or City Center (I'm not sure… with the wind in your hair and the city around you and the cars and the greek flying back and forth, it's hard to hear the tour guide. Oh well.).

Pretty Building

Pretty Building

National Museum of Art and Natural History (probably)

A university building

Pretty statue and tower

CLOCK

University Building farther away from city center

Many of the buildings, the tour guide pointed out, have Dragons on the top: weather vanes, statues, etc. The Welsh are quite proud of their identity and the Welsh dragon appears everywhere. It's like hidden Mickeys, if hidden Mickeys had a penchant for munching on virgins and couldn't get decent fire insurance.

There's a dragon on top there

The tour bus also took us out of the city center towards Cardiff bay, where things started to look a bit more industrial. We passed some evidence of Cardiff's importance as a shipping town, less prominent now than in days past, and moved out into…filming stages and the Doctor Who Experience! Ok- it was a drive by, but at least I know where they are now (and it looks like they aren't that easy to get to…) The Doctor Who experience is shut down at the moment so they can make some Peter Capaldi additions (they're experiencing a "regeneration", the tour guide joked).

BBC production studios

Doctor Who Experience

I have no idea why the TARDIS is there. 

We then drove past the Wales Millennium Center, which yes, is as impressive in person as it appears to be in photographs. This is also the site of some filming.

Plaza outside the center

COLOR

Wowza

Cardiff also appears to have something called "Techniquest", which seems to be some form of science center along the lines of the Exploratorium.

We drove back to the city center passing through some lovely looking buildings of various historical significance (I have no idea… I had trouble retaining what the tour guide was saying at that point because I was straining hard to hear the speakers.) and ended the day by running around Queens Street covering some of the necessary shopping for setting up our apartments. On our way through the supermarket, I picked up something called a "Victoria Sandwich" which is certainly nothing of the sort! It was an impulse buy assisted by its direction of profits towards cancer research, and I made sure to share it with new friends to make sure I didn't eat it all myself. It was delicious (strawberry jam and cream in between cake: I know, right?). One person tried to refuse, but I informed them they had to eat some, it was for cancer.
That worked. ;)
The moral of this story is that you must eat cake to do your part for cancer. It's a terribly serious burden.

Eat cake for cancer.

Taxi ride home!