One of the places I remember best from my first visit to the UK (in college) is a day trip to Cardiff, Wales and, more specifically, to Cardiff Castle’s the Arab Room. Which is unequivocally the most beautiful space I have ever seen. For our last weekend excursion before Sweden and I start working, we went there last Saturday to see it again, Matt probably only agreed so I’d shut up about it…

Cardiff Castle is very strange to approach because it really is just you walk down the main promenade and tons of shops and very modern and then the road ends and your at crazy tall medieval stone walls and then once inside there is a castle in the middle of town. It’s wonderfully close to a real-life time travel feeling. The castle has been around since pre-Roman occupation times and has seen all sorts of history, but let’s get to the less bloody parts. The house part was built by a rich family a few hundred years ago or so and it’s pretty crazy – they had an en suite bathroom about two hundred years before most people even had an inhouse toilet. That’s how much money they had. For real. They also had a table that was designed with a hole in the middle of it so a live potted grape vine could be brought in and arranged in it so you could puck your breakfast fruit right off the vine. There is also an incredible rooftop garden room with a sunken floor that essentially made up a wading pool surrounded by little fountains and planter boxes and I can’t even imagine how gorgeous it must have been when it was in use and in bloom. But, most importantly, the Arab Room. The Arab Room is just one of many little parlour-y rooms, it’s not even the biggest deal one, it was supposedly built to be a ladies sitting room. Apparently they used it as an occasional guest bedroom. It is a fairly small square room with a fireplace on one wall and smallish windows on the other three. The room is considered one of the architect/designers greatest works, inspired by his obsession with Arabic and Moorish design. The ceiling is the focal point, and I don’t know how to describe it. It is everything you could want from the following description, gold, light, fluid, geometry. I’ve read it described ad jelly molded or honeycombed. But, really there just aren’t words. Something about the way it is carved and gilded makes it seem like it makes it’s own light. Come visit us and I will take you to see it, but in the interim, this is a link to a 360 degree view of the room: http://www.360cities.net/image/arab-room-cardiff-castle-by-jon-rowley

I would stayed in the Arab Room all day, but that would have meant nobody else got to go in (as they only let two or so people stand in the entry corner at a time, the rest of the room is roped off) and Matt told me that might not be considered ‘polite’ or ‘the right thing to do’… So, we left and walked the ridiculous trek up the stairs to the Roman keep aka where your fear of stairs is born. The stairs up the various levels alternate between worn and sloping, to backless and overly tall, to spiral and exceptionally narrow. And, there are a lot of them. But mostly there are just A LOT of people on them and not enough room for two people on any given stair. It was just ridiculous and awkward enough to keep it from being genuinely frightening, but as a bonus, had you fallen, you would have been saved from a long fall by all of the other bodies behind you… So, that’s something? Ish? The views up top were well worth it though, lovely panoramas of much of Cardiff and the sea beside it.

Unfortunately, there was not time for much after the castle if we wanted to make it home in time to let the dogs out before a length of time that could be classified as cruel.

So, home we headed, but fantasies about becoming a squatter in the Arab Room still dances in my head.

That’s the thing about having brought our pups with us here, they may not be as inconvenient for travel planning as, say, children, but they definitely aren’t easy. No days longer than 8 (maybe 10, but only with incredible guilt) hours away from home. No weekends away without arranging for a kennel, and no one night in a kennel, because kennels are never open to give you back your pet on a Sunday. Also, no kennel because they cost a fortune. It’s like doubling our own lodging budget.

I love our demon spawn and I don’t think we would have felt good about this move if we had left them behind, assuming we could have even found homes for them for a few years (as, they aren’t exactly popular with anyone who isn’t us), but, man, they get in the way of adventuring. It is becoming a frequent frustration already, especially as it is exacerbated by the also present mass transit hassle.

In theory, when we buy a car some of this will abate, though obviously not the weekend part, or the travel part during hot weather, but any diminishing of inconvenience sounds pretty good to me right now.

More to come.

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