Kabobs, Pizza and Burgers

We have been driving around Wales for about three weeks. In those 21 days, I think maybe four of them have been sunny. The rest have been filled with a clothes drenching drizzle – mist,  or pounding rain. If we’re lucky, there’s also 60mph winds to accompany the rain. This point is most accurately described by the time we visited Harlech Castle, one of the four castles built by King Edward I in Wales, hundreds of years ago. Along with Harlech, there is Conwy,  Caernarfon and Beaumaris. The best castle out of all of them was probably Conwy or Beaumaris.  The day we visited Harlech, it was blowing so hard that when Jack and I walked up onto the castle walls,we almost fell off and were saved by a handsome stranger. If you leaned into the wind, you wouldn’t fall forward. The castles are fun for pretending to be country men, which Jack and I pretend to be when we’re exploring the castle. This usually means standing on the tallest tower, pretending to smoke pipe weed (what they smoke in the Lord of the Rings), calling each other “my good fellow” and talking about the peskiness of wives. Something that I have noticed about Wales, or the UK in general, is that almost everywhere there are restaurants that sell “Kebabs Pizza Burgers” in that combination. They are more common than fish and chip places, and show up even in the most remote of villages. The restaurants are also almost aways accompanied by pictures of chicken nuggets and pizza dancing around. In Chester,there was a weird café modeled after the one in the TV show Friends. Inside there were big TVs playing the show and sketches of the characters and their houses all over the wall. A couple of days ago we were in Cardiff, and went to the Doctor Who Experience, where we went on a simulation of the TARDIS and had to go through fields of various Doctor Who criminals. It was pretty cool, and Sylvia got picked to talk to the Doctor, who called her an android. After Cardiff, we went to Pembrokeshire, wher e it was again, rainy. We walked around but there wasn’t much there, so we drove to another spot on the beach. There were huge waves and at night Jack and I explored a near by field. It was full of sinister looking mounds of dirt (ant hills? land mines?) so we quickly left, making sure not to step on any of them. The next morning we drove for a while until we got to where we are tonight, Aberystwyth, one of the biggest towns in Wales. -Jennah