This weekend two friends and I took a little road trip to South Wales. It was my first time there so it was a good opportunity to see more of the UK than just London, or even just England. It’s a beautiful landscape, but once again I found myself perplexed by some of the historical curiosities of modern Wales.
On the way to Wales we made a quick stop at Stonehenge, something I’ve been dying to see since I arrived here. The Brits seem to really have something against it. Everyone we talked to told us not to go, or if we’re going to go make sure it’s on the way to somewhere else, because it’s horribly boring. But I thought it was quite interesting. First off there’s the natural appeal of getting a photo of yourself in front of a world-famous landmark. But beyond that it is interesting to actually see this thing you’ve seen so many times in photos up close and personal (or as close as they’ll let you get). It is much smaller than you’d think it was, but I think it’s worth the trip.
We stopped off for a pub lunch in a little English village called Bromham, which was quite charming. Then it was on to Wales, crossing the massive Severn estuary. The water level was shockingly low, which was a preview of the rest of the bodies of water we would encounter in Wales. I don’t know if we just kept encountering these things at low tide, but everywhere we went there was no water but just massive banks of mu
Driving from Catalonia to Provence was interesting, most notably because of the number of similarities between the two regions. For one thing the flags of both are very similar, both with red stripes on a yellow background. The native languages of the two regions are also very similar, and I’m told that Provencal and Catalonian are actually almost mutually comprehensible. Of course the big difference is that Catalan is actually the functioning, used language of Catalonia. Provencal is effectively a dead regional language, now only used for scholarly purposes (and, we noticed, on street signs in some of the city centres of the region). The French were just better at enforcing language conformity I guess.
We began the French section of our trip in Montpellier, a university town on the southern French coast. The city isn’t technically or historically part of Provence, but rather the province of Languedoc. We actually didn’t find Montpellier to be very interesting, but that may have a bit to do with the fact that our hotel was terrible and far from the city centre. We did however drive out to the town of Carcassone to the West of Montpellier, a middle ages fortified city that has been remarkably preserved. That was definitely very cool, even if it did remind me of Epcot Center a bit (I could have done without all the kids running around with plastic swords and knight’s helmets). It was a stunningly beautiful city though.
