Cardiff

I figured I was gonna talk about my classes and thier progression and so forth but instead I'm gonna talk about life in Cardiff.

     So my very first night in my new home I went out with Chris and Shannon and Shannon's friend.  We went to the seediest clubs that Cardiff has to offer and Chris explained the last one we went to was a Chav bar, followed by his discription of what a chav might be.  He has a hilarious demonstration if any of you meet him sometime you should totally ask him to do it.  I was massivly broke at this point and living on apples, pasta and canned soup and subsiquently I drank very little in the first couple weeks.  But we had so much fun anyway, I learned the fine art of having fun with no money - apparently when you go with your friends to a bar you aren't legally required to buy anything! Who knew?  My classmate Matt had a birthday in week two (I think) and we were out for hours and I didn't spend a single pound.  So fun.

     Around week three I had money again and I tried to change my habits as little as possible (except of course now I eat food of a higher quality).  There have been some fun nights out, a fair amount of dancing (I know, shocking right?) and some drinking and we went and saw Matt in "Footloose" at a town hall of some kind and it was Hil-arious.  I love people doing the American accent, any time I get to hear other people's view of Americans in general I fall about laughing.  Canadians in particluar have a kinda funny view of us.  I won't go into that just now though.  I have told them that I am not your typical American and they cannot expect Californians to talk or act like me.  Otherwise I feel they'll have an even more warped view then.

     I do hang out with my classmates pretty much everyday and I love it.  I am so blessed to have fallen into a great, rather stange, group.  Just so you can know that they are our kind of people - on three seperate occations we have been in class early and decided what we really wanted to do was hide in the room from our lecturer.  Last Sunday Shannon and I built a fort in the living room, then we had tea and crumpets in it, then when Chris woke up we made him hang out with us in it.  These are totally my people.

     Which brings me to last night - We had been down to the Theatre Royal in Plymouth during the day and then we decided to go out since we have no classes today.  First we went to the campus bar where we met a friend of Shannon's from a previous visit, Sion, and we went up to Blakweir Tavern up the road.  I started talking with Sion and he is awesome, he's a musician and kinda cray, like in an old school punk kinda way but he plays hard folk music.  Shannon was dealing with girly issues (others not hers) so basically I just talked to him for a couple hours and it was superb.  Then he keeps hearing from his cousin that he should come on over to this other bar and he sheepishly asks us, explaining that's it's basically a dive where you meet nutters.  But at the same time he's saying he's not sure he wants to take us there and yet he'd really like us to come.  Quick clarification - at Blackweir most of my class was there, he was asking just Shannon and me.  He's adorable.  So he took us there in a taxi and it was almost a family party, this guy's birthday/open mic night.  Oh, and the taxi drive, it's like Sion and the taxi driver where speaking a different language, I knew the words they were saying, but what they meant by any of it I have no idea.  Sion explained he was taking us to this place and they cracked jokes and explained he was showing us a good time at this dive bar.  At the bar he played, we met his cousin Griff who also played.  We had so much fun with those two, need to hang with them again.

I guess that's all for now - love you!