England, Part II: Rain and Rock

Lots of people have been asking me about my trip to England, so I realized I should just do a few more posts and then I wouldn't have to tell the same stories over and over.

A few weeks removed, my main impressions of England and Wales are dark, dreary, and well, kind of boring. Now, before all you anglophiles get your knickers in a knot, I should qualify this with several facts: (1) I was in the country during the period that it virtually shuts down, from Christmas to New Year's. For goodness' sake, most of the coffee shops were even closed. (2) As stated, I was there from Christmas to New Year's. It got dark every night by 4:30, and since we were so jetlagged that we rarely rose before noon, this left precious little time to do anything interesting, even if it had been on offer. (3) The most memorable thing we did was visit the Welsh Slate Mining Museum.

Now that we've got all that out in the open, I should say that I had a wonderful time. The main point of our trip was for Andrew's family and me to meet, and I'm so glad that we did. His parents were ever so welcoming and did everything they could to make me feel at home, which included many cups of tea, renting a small cottage near his home so that we could all stay together, and even making me the English equivalent of Tofurkey (the call it Quorn) for Christmas dinner. At the end of my stay, his mother more or less officially gave me the seal of approval. And this even after I had loosed my biting sense of sarcasm.

The Welsh Slate Mining museum really was pretty cool. We had planned to spend the day driving around and looking at mountains; Andrew wanted to show me all the mountains he had climbed, but it was too cold and rainy for me to even consider steppping out of the car. So I read my book as we drove, and occasionally he'd point out great heaps of rock, which I would duly admire. At one point we wanted to stop and eat our packed sandwiches, and we happened upon the museum. It was free (Score! So rare outside of the Smithsonian, but it makes me more willing to try a crazy museum than if I don't have to gamble $10 in entrance fees) and turned out to have a highly interesting combination of century-old shop machinery, mining displays, as well as Victorian-aged housing used by the miners and managers. I had been reading a history of Britain during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries during the visit, so all of the facts about mining and industrialization became a lot more understandable when I could see it all in action. And slate really is a pretty stone, especially when it's wet (thank goodness it's always wet there).

I hope I'll get to go back someday and see Wales in the summer. It's pretty enough in the rain, it must be really stunning in sunlight.