My week in Wales
So, I’ve sort of disappeared off the face of the earth for a week, or more specifically, I’ve been visiting Charlotte in Wales since the start of April.
31st March
Met Charlotte and her mum at Manchester airport. Signs became increasing Welsh as we got further into Wales, fun times. Did a very fun nothing all evening. 
I have an inflatable mattress, double-bed sized! Yes!
1st April
How fun, April Fool’s Day, but nothing eventful. Even the usually-good internet fun stories were pretty crap this year. Went into town to do a bit of shopping, and we spent most of the day making pixel cookies – there are photos, they’ll go up somewhere at some point. It took from early afternoon until 1am to do them! Thankfully it wasn’t all hard work today – Charlotte’s mum made us some lovely food (and I had proper breakfast waffles, not potato ones!). It’s so nice to have a week where you can relax so much, and not feel that guilty. But, as you’ll see a bit later, there was some maths done!
2nd April
Quite possibly the earliest morning of the week – I swear, at home I’m usually up well before 10am, but this week 11am was quite an achievement! Our train to Chester left Colwyn Bay at 10am this morning, so we had to be up at 8.30am (8.30!) to get ready and go meet Jess and Harry and all that. It was a very eventful day, with highlights including:
- Jess killing the duck with her bread;
- The hand massager
- Deep Fried Bars Mars (on a stick, indeed);
- Tag in the Roman amphitheatre;
They also made me buy a fair amount of clothes, but in fairness Charlotte bought me a couple of things too. After getting back from Chester, we watched the first Library episode of Doctor Who with Jess and Harry, complemented by (cooked) frozen pizza. After they left, Charlotte and I watched the second Library episode, with Charlotte being particularly freaked out later that night by “Vashta Nerada” and “Come here Charlie… Come here Charlie… Come here Charlie…”. Enjoyable / exhausting day.
3rd April
Today was the day we went to the zoo! Since we got up ridiculously late, it meant that we were only able to go for the afternoon instead of the whole day. Had a huge brunch, in the few weeks that I haven’t been in Oxford I’d forgotten just how much I’d missed hot brunch. The zoo was going to be £8.95, but since we were students of the awesome variety we had to pay a measly £6.60. We saw the birds of prey (a little boy got his teddy bear stolen from the bird, and while the announcer was saying things over the loudspeaker like “the bird is now likely ripping his prey to pieces”, the other woman was able to retrieve the teddy and give it back to the distressed young boy – both very funny and quite sad), the sea lions (they were awesome), the penguins, the monkeys, the bears (well, we saw one bear for a little while, so I suppose we saw the bears), the monkeys (including one which looked like it had OCD) and many smaller animals like turtles and snakes. I got a shiny pencil from the gift shop (which I didn’t have to buy myself, I was most impressed), and Charlotte and I both managed the assault course intended for small children. I maintain that it’s easier for them in some parts…
In the evening time we went out to Weatherspoons to have a few drinks with some of Charlotte’s friends. Apparently, pennying someone’s drink just isn’t acceptable if you don’t go to Oxford / Cambridge… and Will even refused his double-penny forfeit. Silly friends. After Weatherspoons we went to Broadway (the nearest, and possibly only, club in Wales). The bouncer at the door decided that my driving licence was fake (he even started trying to tell me why it was fake, which I was obviously very thankful for, there must be someone very high up in the DVLNI offices that decided to issue me a fake driving licence…), but then subsequently decided that it wasn’t fake after all and left me go in. It was a silent disco – you all got your own pair of wireless headphones and you can choose which of the two DJs you want to listen to. It was really really fun, especially since if you wanted to talk to someone you could take off your headphones and talk to them at a normal volume instead of shouting at them. Unfortunately, after only about 1 1/2 hours of silent-awesomeness they decided “right, that’s enough, time for annoying blaring music!” and took away our headphones and deafened us. But it was a good night in all, and we got back around 1am with enough time to faff around like we always do.
4th April
Today was our day out to Conwy. We first went to pick up Charlotte’s awesome dress for the Keble Ball. We then saw Conwy Castle, and I achieved the rank of a TIME DETECTIVE by filling in all the clues and shiz. I have a badge to prove it and everything! We visited the smallest house in Great Britian (not in the UK because obviously the average sized house in Northern Ireland is smaller than that one ) but it was closed until Easter so we couldn’t go inside. For lunch we went to Llandudno to a semi chip shop / semi restaurant and after that we went to play pool with Steve and Nia. I have somehow (possibly by osmosis) gained some kind of skill at pool, and managed to win both games! Get me!
Today we also managed to do a fair bit of Analysis (get us!) and went out to China Club for dinner – a Chinese restaurant in Colwyn Bay. The food there was amazing – we had chicken skewers and seaweed to start with, then a duck between us, then we shared some sweet and sour chicken and some beef in pepper sauce. And the price was very reasonable too, which is always good. Managed to get a reasonably early night tonight, but stayed up chatting for a fairly long while. Late night chats are possibly the best part of sleeping in the same room as your girlfriend.
5th April
Sunday is the day Charlotte spends with her dad, so I went round there with her. We went to a posh restaurant in a caravan park (I’d have thought that such a thing wouldn’t exist, but there you go) and had a yummy Sunday lunch. With the lunch I had a huge Yorkshire pudding – the largest I’ve ever seen! Wasn’t able to eat it all, but I somehow managed to make room for ice cream afterwards. We all went with Bonnie (the dog belonging to Charlotte’s dad and Sharon) for a walk around Betws-y-Coed (unpronounceable to the uninitiated) and taught Charlie how to skip stones on the river. I hope she took some of it in. Spent part of the afternoon doing a bit more maths, I’m quite impressed with the amount that we managed to do together. Working together on maths makes you so much more motivated.
6th April
We decided that these last two days should be for relaxing, cuddling and maths. We spent almost all day today in PJs, played a whole game of monopoly on my iPhone and finally had to get dressed to go meet Charlotte’s mum’s friends. Barbara (“Charlotte’s mum” gets annoying to type after a while) cooked us a really nice roast dinner. We went to bed quite early, after finishing our Analysis sheet, and although it’s a bit sad that this is the last night that I’m staying over, it was very nice indeed with a cherry on top. Charlotte deserves some kind of star.
7th April
Today is the last day of Wales fun! We finally rescued our pixel cookies from the containers in which they’d been trapped all week and took lots of photos in preparation for making a stop-motion video. Then we ate them! Yum! Played on the trampoline for a while, and then got burgers, chips and beans for lunch – I love getting all this food! We watched some more Doctor Who, and soon it was time to head back to the airport. Charlie and I did some GRF in the back seat, which I now understand quite well, I think. Well, at least the part about equivalence relations and shiz. The plane ride home was very bumpy towards the end, there were a couple of kids sitting behind me who were enjoying it as some kind of rollercoaster – their mum, not so much. Arrived in Belfast, extremely rainy. Had a crazy taxi driver who cared about some football result a little too much. Home… missing a certain person already.
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