by Kelley Blankenship
University of Worcester
This past Saturday marked the first official day of my two week Easter break! Whoop whoop! The International Committee set up a trip by coach to Cardiff, Wales for only £10, so of course I jumped at the opportunity! The day started at 9 am with a 2 hour drive through the beautiful countryside... unfortunately I was in a sleepy daze for the majority of the trip, but still managed to see a good bit of the landscape. We arrived around 11 and had about 6 hours to explore. My travel buddy, Tamara, and I decided to make our way to the Cardiff Castle first. This would be the first castle that I have (finally) made my way to since my time here in Worcester! Tamara and I went on the special guided tour through the main part of the castle which really didn't even look castle-like at all. Nevertheless, it was impressive. Unfortunately, my camera died at this point, but Tamara was so gracious and told me that I could download all of her pictures onto my laptop :) Such a great friend. So most of the photos from Cardiff that you can find on my facebook page are taken by Tamara.
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| National Museum |
After wondering around the castle, we decided to grab a bite to eat and make our way to one of the local heritage museums. The first museum was FREE! I'm not exactly sure of the name of this particular museum, but it featured a really cool interactive timeline of Cardiff's local history since 2000 BC... with a huge gap of nothing between 51 and about 1000 AD... strange. After feeding my inner history nerd, we decided to wonder over to what looked like some very important buildings. We had found City Hall and... some other important government buildings. But next to them was the National Museum. Naturally we decided to check it out and discovered that it, too, was FREE, and was filled with an entire gallery of paintings ranging from the Tudor period to artist from today. There was also a very interesting exhibit called The Queen: Art & Image. This exhibit had various famous images of the Queen throughout her long reign. This was also an exhibit that celebrated The Queen's Diamond Jubilee ... pretty awesome.
After the museum, it was naturally time to check out the local shops.... if I only had loads of money...
The end of the day was marked by a sleepy coach ride back through the countryside to Worcester. I liked getting out of Worcester for the day, but when I saw the cathedral in the distance, I was definitely glad to be back home.
“Where ever you go, go with all your heart.”