Surviving...

Well, we have officially been making ourselves food for the past few days and we are still here to tell about it and we haven't gotten arrested or completely lost so I think this is going to work out just fine. No, besides still having rain everyday, things here in Wales have been quite pleasant. We were able to get our "mobile" phones and our train discount cards along with lots of wandering around to figure out the lay of the town. Pretty much feel like my legs are about to fall off by the end of the day with all the walking we do, but of course it's good for us! :)
Saturday night, most of the Central crew decided to go out on the town to check out the pub and club life in Bangor, in which there are like 40 some pubs. Being in such large groups we were immediately picked out as being American. Along with the large groups, we were all wearing our coats because it was raining off and on along with being a bit chilly. Apparently, people don't really care about those things because that was a dead give away that we were not from the area. When we did decide to head to the pub called the Octagon, we found out that Saturday night was for the locals and we were heckled a bit even before we got into the line to get in. Needless to say, we didn't end up there for the evening. Having gone quite a ways away, everyone decided to head back to the Yellow Pub, which I found to be very appealing. Pretty much a place for people to gather and have a good time, rather than more of the club setting with lots of flashing lights and loud music. On the way back, we figured out why everyone call the hill heading back up to the dorm area " BFH" (big fucking hill) or "bitch hill." No joke, I would never take a car of any kind down it if there was even a chance of ice! I'll make sure we get some pictures of this one cause it is a killer!
Sunday morning, Derek and I walked to Hope Church which is about 1 mile away. It is very contemporary and a pretty young congregation of about 50 people I would say. This church only began about 4 years ago and is aimed toward college students. We will for sure be checking out other churches in the area just to see what is out here but I think we both enjoyed this one. Of course, keeping the Pella tradition, we reserved our Sunday afternoon to naps!
Today was the first day trip that we took as a Central group with Tecwyn, our adviser guy, as our guide. We first went to Caernarfon Castle and only spent about 2 hours there. It is the largest castle in Edward I's Iron Ring of castles and we could have easily spent a whole afternoon wandering around all the corridors. It had a lot of museum type things in some of the main rooms about the battles that took place but it would have been nice to see more about how is was built, but of course, being as it was built from 1283-1330, there isn't much photo evidence and such about the building. No, we didn't find the dungeon but we do plan to go back later this spring so we'll check that out for sure! After the castle, our tour stopped by the ocean side by another one of Edward I's castles for some ocean pictures. We had lunch in another small town that Tecwyn claims has the best ice cream in Wales and then headed up to the Llechwedd slate mines. We were able to go down a bit into on of the shafts but the one trolly that goes much deeper was closed because of flooding due to the massive amounts of rain we have been getting. What was almost more amazing than the mines themselves were the slate tips that were around the area of the mines. They were literally mountains of slate waste that were unable to be made into shingles and dumped into HUGE piles. Tecywn grew up in this area and when his father was a child, there were only a few of the mountains around but in dumping that much slate tip, there is now, what I would call, a slate tip mountain range.
This whole area we were traveling in is called Snowdonia. We will actually be doing more of an in depth tour of the towns next weekend but we did stop at a waterfall because Tecwyn knew it would be gushing from all the rain. And it was. That is our past few days, many more stories but never enough time! Derek did post the links to our pictures so be sure in check those out! Hopefully they will be able to give you a visual of some of the places we talk about. Tomorrow we are going to start the difficult class registration process, o joy...