Smoking, Silent Discos and Strolling

whew, sorry for not posting anything about travel day, but really, you probably know how that went, plane, airport, bus, airport, plane, airport, bus. Somehow with all those vehicles I still managed to walk around 4 miles yesterday...1 of which was walked while lugging around 60 kilos of luggage.

So, now I'm in Cardiff, safe and sound, the weather is gorgeous, although the spontaneous rain does still crop up occasionally.

So, last night, one of my flatmates and I went to our local pub (The Social Centre for future reference) There, we discovered that in these hallowed halls of the UK, the beer of choice for most discerning (read: 'broke') college students is Fosters. That's right lads and ladies, the word 'Fosters', Australian for: we-can't-believe-you-really-drink-this-kangaroo-sweat-in-a-can-but-we-love-your-money-anyway. Disregarding my tastebuds, because cool and frosty is cool and frosty, I set to. We promptly met Alex, poor bloke from Singapore who had no one to drink with, so we turned the duet to a trio and made quite the set, observing my new favorite British Fashion trend, the mini-dress with leggings. Soon we observed the statistical supportability of a conclusion that most of these minidresses were swaying off in one general direction. Happening upon a hypothesis that mayhaps there was an even occurring of momentous circumstance, we left the local pub (yes, our housing complex has its own) and set off down the lane.

We arrived at Solus, paid cover, and went inside. Another Fosters and a shot of off-brand vodka later we reached the conclusion that Solus was indeed quite lame, being as we didn't know anyone. Deciding to duck out onto the balcony as Alex wanted a smoke break and didn't want to go alone, we discovered the rest of the Internationals. There was Christina from Latvia, Brigette from France, Becky from Sheffield...okay, not technically international, but who cares. The moral of the story is, suddenly Solus was not lame, in point of fact it was quite excellent. So we chatted, they left, I met a gorgeous bird who's studying Computer Science...fairly sure it wasn't a hallucination, and we chatted regarding favorite coding languages while other people looked at us in disgust. It was a grand time.

It also helped me to realize something. Over here, it's not what color you are, it's where you're from. For example, Christina was great, so were some of the British girls out there with us, but by and large we get ignored by 90% of the English. The Welsh don't mind us, had a great laugh with a few that I couldn't understand, but the others don't care for us apparently, regardless of my allegedly sexy accent. Still, I'd rather go to the pubs with the internationals, we have more fun, more backgrounds, and realize there's more to life than drinking and dancing. There's also smoking and chatting on balconies, even if you never see each other again, it makes for a pleasant evening. From the dark side of the world, cheers.

-JK