Most people know a least a little bit about the time God saved France from being owned by the English when He sent a French peasant girl named Joan of Arc to lead the Gallic troops and repel the Anglo aggressors. Fewer people know He had saved France from the English not long before, when… Read more The Death of Henry V
All languages have taboo words (the so-called dirty words for example) and all languages will lose innocent words that sound a little too much like a taboo word. No one uses the worded niggardly any more, even though it simply means “miserly”, because it has a very bad word indeed in it. It has no… Read more Feckful and Feckless
Sorry I haven’t been blogging lately. You would think that I could at least blog about history is I had no facinating Welsh anecdotes to pass along; history happens every day right? And this IS a history blog, right? Well, technically it’s a history blog … but let’s be honest. I’m going to talk about… Read more Whut is werds?
There is no Utopia and now we have discovered the dark underbelly of Welsh life – how they assign schools. Good Lord is it frustrating. Okay, in the USA you are guaranteed a place in the school of your district. If you move into that district on August 20th and school starts on the 21st,… Read more The Fly in the Ointment
We are, so to speak, right down the road from a really cool trackway – the fossilized footprints of a dinosaur from 200 million years ago. The trackway is in the Bendricks, “a stretch of coastline and an important paleontological site in the Vale of Glamorgan in south Wales located along the northern coast of… Read more A’fossiling We Will Go
Oh, woe unto me. We’ve been suffering horribly under all this bad Welsh weather we were warned about. See how awful it is? Truly, we are suffering from all these sunny days with highs in the mid 70s. How do the locals stand such an appalling climate? In order to deal with the pain, we… Read more More Wretched Welsh Weather
Time to begin exploring the history and culture of Wales! And where better to do that than the free, open-air, 40 acre walk though the Welsh past that is St. Fagan’s national history museum? It’s lush, it is! It is in a beautiful park and woodland nature paths between the buildings, which have been meticulously… Read more St. Fagan’s National Museum
Sweet Babou’s company got him a new phone here quickly, but trying to get a local phone for me has been a nightmare. You cannot get a contract without a British bank account and a passport alone is insufficient to get a bank account; you must have your visa biometric paperwork. It’s taking it them… Read more This is Cardiff
I may have unlocked a new level in melanin deprivation. I managed to get sunburned in WALES. I’m outside in a place that is 10 degrees NORTH of Moscow, Russia (I’m not making that up) and I got sunburned. Just … HOW?? Sure, we’re out on the beach and walking around every day, but the… Read more Sunburnt? HOW?!?!
Sweet Babou and I are big fans of a marvelous BBC One show called Gavin & Stacey. A main premise of the show is the heroine’s attachment to Barry Island and her Welsh friends and family. We now live about 5 minutes from Barry and Barry Island. Guess where we went as soon as… Read more Hiya Barry Island. What’s Occurring?