Wales

For a week in the break after Lent Term in school, our grandparents visited and took us kids up to Wales for the week. It was quite fun, getting lost on the roads. We'd be going in the right direction, and then the road would look like it was the wrong direction, so we'd turn around and ask someone, whether they be a pedestrian or someone at the gas station, for directions and find out that we were going in the correct direction, so we'd turn back round the right way and make our way to our destination.

On the night we arrived in Newport, we drove up to a town called Caerleon, where we had dinner with our distant relatives. One of them was my fourth cousin, in fact! They had extremely generous hospitality to offer to us. They even led us to the B&B that we were going to stay at for the night. Before dinner, they showed us around the nearby Roman ruins, which were spectacularly preserved. There was even an arena which was apparently the only Roman arena in Britain, and they, as a town, had kept it as their own little secret.

The B&B was very nice, run by a hospitable middle-aged lady called Charmaine. Apparently, it was a farmhouse, and it was a farmhouse with an amazing view over the town of Caerleon below. You see, it was in the mountains, very much out of the way. Our rented car made the steep drive up the hill, though.

On the day after, we had a drive up to a village northwest of Abergavenny called Crickhowell, which had, nestled in the middle of the town, our 2nd B&B. However, when Joanie rang the doorbell, no one answered. Whilst Joanie and I tried all the doors to see if they were open, my sister found a slightly demolished trampoline, so she bounced around on that. We then used the extremely handy spare cell phone that Dad had lent me for the trip to call the owner. She said that she would be back in half an hour.

While we waited, we went for a hike up Table Mountain, which was a climb with exquisite views over Abergavenny and Crickhowell. Surprisingly, it only took us two hours to get up and back, and our grandfather, Carey, was deeply satisfied with that trek. His goal for the trip was to walk up a mountain of a significant height. The highlight of the climb for the kids, though, was going down. The actual walk was going through fields and climbing over stiles, so coming down, my sister and I would starting running downwards, and then we would start going faster until we were completely out of control, and it was too much effort to stop, so we just kept going, laughing hard all the way and we would fall down near the stiles so as not to crash into them. Of course, then we'd have to wait for our grandparents to come down too before hopping over the next stile.

Next day, much of the morning was spent driving down to the Gower Peninsula with much difficulty. As I said before, we always got lost when going the right way. Again, the owner of the B&B was yet to arrive, so we called them, and the owner's teenage daughter came. To make the matters even more difficult, when she called her mum, her mum said that she didn't have us booked. She came along to the rescue, looked at our bookings, and decided that they looked alright. Phew.

Since the rooms were still to be made, we drove all the way to the other end of the peninsula to Rhosili beach. It was the very first time that we hadn't gotten lost, but it was just a straight road until it dead-ended by the beach. That was the biggest expanse of sand any of us had ever seen. The cliffs overlooked the low tide that day, yet not making shadows, because the sun set in the sea. I could just imagine what high tide would look like, lapping water on the bottom of the cliffs, threatening to go upwards.

For dinner that night, we went to a pub that we saw by the beach called The Worm's Head. After much giggling and discussion over the name, Carey told us that worm was the welsh word for a dragon, so they were really talking about a dragon's head. Anyway, the food was delcious and the sunset was spectacular. The sun was orangy-red, almost pinkish, and it made the cliffs farther down the beach silhouettes overlooking the calm ocean.

On the way back to Newport to get our train, I thought about the various breakfasts we had at the B&Bs. They were all the same, with bacon, sausage, egg, hash browns, tomatoes and mushrooms, with the exception of a mere Welsh pancake that my sister had at the second B&B. It must be a UK thing, because when we visited the Lake District, we had the very same thing.

Also on the way to our train, we stopped at the Museum of Welsh Life, which took houses from all four corners of Wales and put them together in an outdoor museum. I thought it was very good, and I especially admired all the varieties of architecture that they had. It was a very good end to our visit.

Visit to York

Over the weekend before I had my second hockey tournament, my family and I visited the city of York for a night. It's a great city, with diverse restaurants and a rich, Viking based history.

Whilst visiting the Viking Centre, we went on a rather cheesy ride, which is kind of like the haunted house rides you get sometimes at funfairs. However, this one informed visitors about Vikings, and they had figures of Vikings built that, apparently, were based on Vikings' skeletons that they found in York.

Soon afterward, before we went to check into our hotel, we visited the famed city wall, which was the slightly demolished city wall surrounding the old city of York. Of course, the city has been expanded very far out of those walls.

The wall itself had little slits in it for archers to shoot arrows out of. Since they were so thin, very rarely did an enemy's arrow get through. Interestingly enough, some of the slits were longer than others. I suspect this was because some were for powerful longbows, and some for the highly accurate, but smaller, crossbows.

After we had checked into our hotel, I remembered that the final of the Six Nations, Wales v Ireland, was on, so Dad and I turned on the tube and watched that for a while. Once Ireland had won the Grand Slam, we had some dinner at a Chinese buffet (much to the disappointment of Mum) and went to bed.

In the morning, we groggily picked ourselves up and went down to breakfast at the hotel. The hot food did not seem to be open, so we munched on cereals, toast and rolls, and drank coffee and hot chocolate.

We would have liked to stay for lunch in York, but then we wouldn't make the tournament in time. So we drove back to Cambridge and settled back down into our normal, daily routine.

The End is Near

Already, 2 thirds of the year have gone by and it seems like the first day of school was yesterday! All my lessons, sports matches, and days off have been a blur, and now I just have the Summer Term left to enjoy school. It's always like that, isn't it. When you are doing something in the present, it usually seems very long. Yet once you've finished doing that something, it seems like a blink of an eye.

House Points and Discipline

At school, we have these things called house points. It's where if you do something very good or excellent, you get a house point. The reason that they are called 'house points' is because all of the house points that your house earns altogether is added up at the end of term and whichever house has the most wins. We would never get anything like it in America.

According to my sister, you can also lose HPs. In our year it never happens, but apparently it does in Year 3. She was on a field trip recently, and apparently, one of her classmates had lost 2 HP for throwing a rock at some cows. He got 'told off' for that. I really don't understand why being told off is so horrible. I mean, you just get some sort of lecture from a teacher and that's it. You don't have to sit out for a while or anything.

However, the funniest story that I have heard from my sister about discipline was when her class was doing PE. The same boy was talking out of turn repeatedly, so the PE teacher sent him to change back into uniform, sit down on the bench and do handwriting practice. I really do find that consequence, especially for PE, strange.