Cardiff

Last weekend John and I went to Cardiff (the capital of Wales). It was the first UK country I’ve been to, apart from England obviously. We had a really good time. John planned the whole weekend and kept everything on the itinerary a secret.

We drove there after work on Friday. It was only a couple of hours away and we didn’t run into much traffic. John had made reservations at a really nice little restaurant called The Armless Dragon. They had a small, specialist menu that changed daily. I had fish and John had pigeon. We both really liked what we had. I was told mine was boneless, so didn’t really look through it very carefully. After I had taken a couple of bites that clearly had bones in them I discovered that there actually were bones in the middle, it was sort of filleted but they’d left the bones in the middle and you could easily slide the meat off the bones on both sides. It tasted a LOT better once I realized this!

After dinner we went to a bar, but my stomach was really hurting (I’m convinced it was due to all the bones I’d eaten) so since it was taking ages to get served anyway we just went back to the hotel for the evening.

The next morning we had beautiful clear skies and sunshine, although it was very cold. We went on a tour around Cardiff Castle. We had a really good tour guide who was funny and informative. After the castle we went to lunch at a really nice French restaurant. John had wanted to get the reservations for dinner but couldn’t get in, so we had a late lunch there instead. It was really delicious. Because we’d dressed to be out all day instead of dressing to go to a nice restaurant for dinner, we were a bit underdressed. Oh well, they were nice about it and I got a heaping portion of mussels regardless!

After lunch we went to Millennium Stadium, which is where the rugby team plays as well as hosting lots of football, concerts, etc. It’s the only stadium in the UK with a retractable roof. We had another charismatic tour guide for that tour.

Thankfully we’d both stuffed ourselves so much at lunch that we didn’t need any dinner, because John had booked us tickets to see Romeo and Juliet at Cardiff’s theatre. We both enjoyed it although at points were struggling to stay awake – between all the walking all day, having no nap, the darkness and the flowery Shakespearian speech it was nearly enough to send us into nap time!

After the theatre we went to a fun, grungy bar that played really good indie music. We watched the mostly student crowd dance, snog, drink, and sing to all the great indie music of the moment. It became painfully obvious to us that our uni days are quickly becoming the days of yor.

The next day was still cold, but this time overcast and rainy. We went to Cardiff Bay and walked around for as long as we could stand it. The bay is really nicely done up. It reminded us a lot of Liverpool. It was clean, modern, and had loads of restaurants and bars. It had obviously had a huge renovation in the last few years.

On the way home we went to a mine that was about 40 minutes outside of Cardiff. It was wicked! I hadn’t been in anything like it. It was a lot more structured than I imagined. It had lots of support beams and equipment and the tunnels were big and tall. It went on for miles. We don’t really know how big it was but it was at least three miles. Of course, we only were guided through a very small section of the entire mine. And yet again we had a wonderful tour guide. Three for three on Welsh tour guides!

Click the pic above to link to all the pictures from the weekend.