Cardiff, Wales - a population of around 300,000, 15% of which are students, and some of the worst weather in the UK (so I've been told). Be that as it may it was actually quite sunny for my first week there. I'm due to go back again later in the month.

The first thing you can't help but notice is every sign and notice is bi-lingual with English and Welsh (although apparently only around 20% of the population can fluently speak Welsh). The Welsh language is apparently spoken as far afield as the Americas and back home in Australia and New Zealand.

Cardiff Castle is very ugly and has a very long history spanning nearly 2,000 years since the arrival of the Romans during the first century AD.

The castle sits in the southeast corner of Bute Park, a huge parkland right in the city centre. I had a nice meander through here before being accosted by the Latter Day Saints. Two of them followed me all the way back to work, listening to my rather detailed reasoning behind why I find religion a completely ridiculous paradigm in this day and age (I can see why people turned to the extreme for answers millennia ago when they couldn't explain thunderstorms and the eclipse, but not in the 21st century), and I listened to their views on it all. Again, we ended where we started - they still believe in an all-powerful entity and I don't, but I was given yet more paraphernalia to take away in an attempt to make me see otherwise. I like how it says "Another Testament of Jesus Christ", I think adding 'yet' to make it "Yet Another Testament of Jesus Christ" would be more appropriate - there are almost as many testaments as there are models of cars.

Then, if that wasn't enough religion for one week, an erroneous setting on my work PC's Internet browser redirected me from the company's internal intranet site out to this site on the Internet: Gospel Hall Directory, Australia! It just so happened that the intranet address closely matched the Internet address for this site and the erroneous setting sent me there instead. Jesus Christ (literally!).

On my last day in Cardiff (for now) I did a sightseeing bus tour through the city during my lunch break to see a bit further afield. Cardiff is only a small place and is nice enough for a short trip away but I wouldn't want to live there - too many dropkicks wandering the streets much like Glasgow.

Cardiff Bay. Yup.

The best part of the tour was near the end of it. The route required a left turn into this narrow side-street toward the Millennium Stadium. The problem today was both a truck taking up a whole lane to unload, and the blue car parked right on the corner. I could see this just wasn't going to happen but the driver (some silly old coot) gave it a shot anyway and this was the inevitable result - he turned the bus into the front of the car and wiped it a beauty hahaha! It took someone standing on the footpath to yell out before we stopped! We then reversed out and rushed off hehe. Eariler, about ten minutes into the tour, we had driven past an overhanging road sign that missed wiping the side of the bus by literally millimetres - I didn't have time to get a shot of it but I'm not kidding when I say millimetres!

Night shots of town on a Monday night - dead!