two years two months two days

It’s surprising how many people from the course I’m still in touch with. I chat with Genia on whatsapp and\or on facebook messenger daily ( diolch am dy gymorth di gyda fy nosbarth i, BTW - if that’s any accurate), Liz and I also have a few nice little conversations every once in a while (I’ve just sent her pictures of the flat I’ll hopefully be moving into next week), Ren’s always a joy to talk to, despite the fact that she’s often lost somewhere on the globe and hard to track down (she shared cool photographs of Chinese terracotta warriors with me some time ago), Charles might be silently reading the mostly nonsensical messages Genia and I, and sometimes Ren too, exchange on our messenger group, Matt has been following the blog ( diolch yn fawr !...), Phil and I jokingly became husband and wife ( gwr a gwraig , can’t use accents on ws here with this keyboard configuration) for an imaginary Welsh soap opera with a great soundtrack , and even Ioan, who’s wisely not on facebook or ...

This is going to be an annoyingly bilingual post (I can only dream of the day there’ll be trilingual texts here too - a blog about learning Welsh in Wales with posts in the language, yay!). Esta vai ser uma postagem irritantemente bilíngue (só posso sonhar com o dia em que haverá textos trilíngues aqui também - um blog sobre aprender galês no País de Gales com postagens no idioma, ê!). It was inspired by a few brief conversations I had yesterday about my stay in Wales - BTW, it has just given me an idea for another post of the same type. Ele foi inspirado por algumas conversas rápidas que tive ontem sobre a minha estada no País de Gales - e, aliás, acabou de me dar uma ideia para outra postagem do mesmo tipo. To make reading easier, I’m going to try and use short sentences and not many real paragraphs - so, shall we? Para facilitar a leitura, vou tentar usar frases curtas e não muitos parágrafos de verdade - então vamos? Q: What’s the population of Wales? P: Qual é a popul...

‘Yes, I’m staying for a few days only. What would you recommend I should do? It’s my first time here and I haven’t read much about the city...’ ‘Well, there’s St Fagans, you should definitely go to St Fagans. It’s my favourite place and it’s very popular with tourists as well…’ So, the following day or the other, there I am, at St Fagans National History Museum in Cardiff, Wales. Its website does a much better job at advertising it than I could ever do - well, I’m actually taking cold tablets, so I’m having more trouble than usual concentrating, sorry (if this post sounds weirder than average). Where was I? At St Fagans, yes. Cheating from said website (have a look at its amazing photographs, though): ‘St Fagans is one of Europe's leading open-air museums and Wales's most popular heritage attraction and admission is free!’ - open-air, heritage attraction, free! Great keywords. ‘Open to the public since 1 November 1948, the museum stands in the grounds of the ma...

I was going to bed. Seriously, I was (has anyone else noticed the number of things I say I was going to do here on this blog?... Or are they only in my head and it’s guilt that’s making me feel as if I’d written about them? Anyway). I’m not feeling very well, physically speaking, I mean, today so I was going to bed without having studied any Welsh or done any writing about Wales. I was, until I saw a post from a summer Welsh course classmate (yes, it’s your fault I’m not getting any sleep for the several hours it’ll take me to finish this, Craig, whether you’re there reading this yourself or not) and decided to finally read an article about a topic which has appeared a couple of times on my Facebook timeline recently - and, to make matters worse, decided to comment on it. I’m not going to link it here. I refuse to give the person who ‘inspired’ it - and what I imagine to be an avalanche of tweets - any more free publicity. I’m not even mentioning their name - or their gender, BTW...