Holiday in Wales

As mentioned in my last post, we stayed at a friend's place for the past week, up in Wales. And honestly, it was one of the nicest holidays I've had in a while. It's rare that I get to switch off so completely - when I visit my mother I still have to think about her wants and needs as a priority, and when I just have time off at home, I still have all the usual everyday considerations to keep track of - how much food is in the fridge, whether it's time to do laundry etc.

This past week I truly didn't have to think about any of that; we just did the bare minimum of planning (e.g. when going to a shop together, we'd talk about what food we'd want to buy) and I went for hours without even looking at the clock. It was so nice.

The old Norman Keep in Cardiff Castle

We weren't completely lazy either - though most days were quite chill, we went to the beach more than once, visited Cardiff Castle and watched the solar eclipse together. Our friend had thoughtfully ordered a bunch of special eclipse glasses in advance, which were really helpful for actually seeing the moon move in front of the sun. The one time I had previously witnessed an eclipse back in Austria (which must have been in 1999) I remember it getting noticeably dark, though I wasn't able to look at the sun back then. This time the difference in brightness actually seemed less pronounced to me (maybe because the reflections on the beach made the area quite well lit regardless) but the clear view of the event through the glasses was pretty amazing.

Close-up of the 2026 eclipse taken over Wales, with enough zoom to see the sun's knobbly bits
 
One little adventure that was less fun - though memorable - was when all three of our phones started howling at the same time thanks to the government's citizen alert system. It was only displaying a message in Welsh at first, which none of us speak, so I was definitely wondering whether there was a nuclear meltdown going on and we just didn't know about it yet. A few minutes later they finally sent the English version and it was basically "it's really dry and we have issues with a record number of fires, so please be careful not to start any" (I paraphrase). A relevant message for sure, but they could've sent it without setting off the modern equivalent of an air raid siren.

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