Bristol -- Cardiff -- Bristol: 29/4/23

One more Full English breakfast from the buffet, and I headed out to the station to take a train to Cardiff. I missed the first one by about thirty seconds, so I had to wait half an hour, which gave me time to read the historical signage around the station. This was taken from a number of different sources, and seems to have been compiled at different times under different conditions, so it's hard to extract a coherent narrative, but basically the station was built on reclaimed land by Brunel, and parts of it were then sold off and bought back again. At the moment most of it seems to be held up by scaffolding. And like Gloucester, it has several sub-platforms along the length of the one long platform. 

The train was relatively empty and fairly quick, stopping only at a couple of regional stations before taking the tunnel under the Severn into Wales, where it stopped at Newport and Cardiff. Wales has its own regional railway system, and of course the signs here all appear in two languages. You can hear the different regional accent being spoken quite a lot here, although being a biggish city there are lots of immigrants from other parts of Britain. Not so many non-Anglos here as in most other places I have been so far.

Cardiff Station is at one end of Westgate Street, which is where most of the action in Cardiff seems to be, and Cardiff Castle is at the other. It's a twenty-minute walk between them. Lots of nice old buildings, with some arcades and covered markets on the way, and a busy brewery sector here, as well as in Bristol. I walked in the free public park around the castle for a while -- lots of squirrels out now -- and then visited the castle itself. The remaining parts are largely residential, though the battlements and keep are still intact, and you can walk in a tunnel under the battlements almost around the four sides of the block, as well as on the battlements themselves. This was used as an air-raid shelter in WWII for the Cardiff public, and some exhibits and posters are set up as a reminder of that era. 

The keep is a round tower on a raised mound in the centre of the castle grounds. There are good views from here and some precipitous staircases to climb. I opted out at the second level, which was quite high enough for me.

The house itself is early Victorian and was owned by the Marquesses of Bute. A Marquess is a sort of Duke who hasn't quite made it, but this lot obviously had pots of money and were prepared to spend it on ornate Pre-Raphaelite carvings and decorations in their rooms, mostly with a sort of Arthurian fantasy theme. There was a large library which the current owners -- the City of Cardiff -- had tried to stock with appropriately old books, and it all seemed very impressive until you looked closer and found they had three complete sets of Dickens, two Britannicas, and several repeats of the other works. Obviously they had gone to a second-hand bookshop and ordered unwanted books by the yard to fill the shelves.

Then to the Museum of Cardiff, which talks mainly about the city itself and only really has two rooms, though there is also a very nice tiled passage which used to form the side entrance. On the way I passed a labor-union organised march, with drums, banners, and a band and a woman at the front shouting unintelligible things through a megaphone; about thirty people in all, with a couple of bored police at either end shepherding it along. And I should comment that Cardiff, like Bristol and Bath, is very good at providing pedestrian precincts and telling the cars to piss off out of it. Much more so than, say, Penrith, or for that matter Sydney.

Afterwards I walked back down the High Street and found a brewpub called Tiny Rebel, where I had a beer and some chicken wings. For some reason there seemed to be a spate of Hens' Nights -- which apparently start at about eleven AM -- in the main street, and one venue in particular had a steady stream of heavily made-up women in wildly inappropriate clothing going in and out as I went past. Like the 7 AM Lingerie Bar at the Flemington Markets brewery -- now just a normal pub -- it was about as sexy as a slap in the face with a wet fish. But the whole street was very busy -- almost like a Spanish town.

It was only about 2:30, but the weather was grey and grim, so I caught the train back to Bristol and went in search of the other brewery near to my hotel. Both breweries were jam-packed with people, spilling out on to the pavement and drinking from plastic cups, but the one I had been to yesterday at least had seats inside, so I went there instead. Then to Sainsbury's for supplies, and back to the hotel.

There is apparently a three-day music festival on in an unprepossessing building just down the street, so young people carrying cans and glasses have been making their way down there for several hours now. That might explain why the breweries are so busy. But I haven't heard any noise from inside my hotel room. Even my construction workers have pretty well knocked off for the weekend while the concrete dries, but they have drawn a few lines on the concrete and put in some reinforcing rods.

Tomorrow is a Bank Holiday -- which seems to mean more here than it does in Oz -- and they are gearing up for the Coronation next week, by which time I will be safely back home.