On Saturday, March 29th  I got up bright and early (10am) and got ready to head out the door. I had a change of clothes, 6 sandwiches, and my computer and cameras with me when I left, and I was travelling alone to North Wales. I honestly knew very little about the place I was going. I had found it on a travel site, liked the name, and heard it had some Alice in Wonderland ties, so I figured it was a good spot to go.  

Around 5pm I made it to Liverpool, where I had about 30 minutes to wander around before I had to get on the bus again. I had seen this radio tower from the stop and decided that I would see how close I could get to it before I had to run back to the station. I didn't make it terribly far, but there are some pictures included in the Llandudno photo album (I'll link you at the end). 

Finally at 8pm (about an hour early actually) I was in Llandudno. The bus station was just a stop on the road, and the streets were already abandoned. Llandudno is a very small beach town, you can walk from one side to the other in about 20 minutes, and when it's not peak season for tourists it's very very quiet. I found my hostel in about 30 minutes, it turned out to be right around the corner from the bus stop but of course I had gone the wrong way, and then decided to take a quick walk to get my bearings. I found my way to the beach, walked along it to the pier, and then started a climb up the mountain. I have a bad habit of scaring myself when I'm in creepy places though, and about halfway up the path I was on I had to run back down because I had convinced myself there were angry ghosts following me. Yeah, I'm an adult, can you tell? I decided to call it a night so that I could wake up early. 

In the morning I started my trek to the Great Orme and the old copper mines that were in it. I had been planning on taking the tram, but it turned out to be closed. So was the cable car, and the buses weren't running frequently, so I decided to give up and just explore the area at the bottom of the mountain. This turned into climbing every single path on the mountain. I finally found the mines sometime around 2, and made it to the summit around 4. It was beautiful, but 15 miles of walking had started to wear me out. 

The Great Orme has a few quarries on it, and near one of them people seem to have a tradition of writing things out of the loose stones. The first evidence I saw of this was this on my way to the summit:

Once I got to the summit and looked back down towards the quarry I noticed that the entire hill was covered in words and shapes. It was interesting to see what was spelt, though most of the time it was just peoples names. 

I only had 1 run in with the goats, and 1 run in with some horses. Dogs were a bit more of a problem though, and I had several decide that they didn't like me wearing a hat and that they were going to get it off of my head. I was successful in not showing that it terrified me when they jumped on me though, so I'm quite proud. It's easier to not be afraid of dogs here since most of them are so well trained that if they're jumping on you, it's likely they just want to play. I haven't seen one dog try and attack someone since I've been here. 

The next morning I played proper tourist. I took a bus tour through Llandudno and the next town over, Conwy. It was just me and about 6 old people from Scotland, which was an interesting experience in itself. When the tour got to Conwy I hopped off and headed for the castle. This is the first castle I'd been to since I've been here, so I was extremely excited. It was amazing to explore, and I had so much fun looking at the landscape from the top of the towers. 

When I got out of the castle I headed down to the docks, and as I was walking there was a man just chilling out holding a hawk on one hand and petting another that was sitting on a bench. I went over and kept a good distance for a bit before he asked me to come over closer and meet the birds. That's when this picture occurred (Brace yourself, I'm not wearing a hat, and I'm smiling. I know it's overwhelming):

The man was incredibly sweet, and the birds were as well. They loved to have you pet their bellies. Just down the road from him was the smallest house in the UK. I can't remember the dimensions but I'll put a link to the houses website in the links page. 

That day when I got back I went to the beach, and then back to the pier. The arcade games successfully stole a couple of pounds from me, but it gave me a few hours of entertainment. I ended the day with another walk along the beach, this time at low tide, and I found my sisters name written in stones where the water usually was. I think it may have been the last thing I expected to see.  

Llandudno is a fantastic town with excellent people in it. The Llandudno Youth Hostel is a wonderful place to stay, no matter what age you are. The first 2 nights it was me and a couple of older people as well as my roommate that was probably in her 30's. The last night it was just me, which was a bit creepy, but the people that work there are fantastic and the rooms are amazingly clean. The only problem I had was at the Town House, so if you're there and looking for a drink, don't go there. They tried to tell me that my license and passport were both fake and that I wasn't old enough to drink. I finally got my drink, but I was well angry by the time I did. There are plenty of other places to go that are much friendlier though. 

If you want to look at pictures they are here, here, and here and if you want some links to the things that I did you can check out the links page here. 

Ok, in the next few days (probably on next Tuesday, actually) I'll be doing a lot of updating this website. I have photos to add, links to add, and I'm gonna update my blog probably 3 or 4 times in one day. I understand this is exsessive, but I want to talk about Wales, and the Globe Theatre, and this coming weekend, and possibly something else. I don't expect anyone to read all of these updates, but I'll be sure to tag them well so you know what they're about and can skip what you're not interested in. 

I've seriously neglected this blog and website, and it's time to start shaping up again. I have 22 days left here. Each day I'm going to do something on my list I created before I got here. I also plan to spend more time in the parks and outside now that the weather is so much better, as well as be more social. Well, try to be more social. 

See you next week

Tasarion

I apologize if this post seems out of place, I understand this is probably not the best place for it, but this blog is supposed to be about all of my experiences travelling. I'm currently experiencing problems with some of my classmates here, and I feel it needs to be addressed so that it doesn't lead to me building up tension about it. 

I am striving to become a filmmaker. This means that I spend a lot of my life doing work that doesn't seem to you like it's work. Just because you're a "journalist" for a "newspaper" at Temple doesn't mean that you are better than me. We live two different lives, we have two different goals in said lives, and we should both work very hard to achieve what we want to. Life takes everyone down a different path and that's something you have you understand. While you work hard to find stories and tell the truth to the entire world, I work hard to write or find stories to tell people to help them escape from and accept the truth of the world. Both of these things are very important in society and neither should be looked down upon (unless, maybe, the job is being done wrongly or harmfully). 

I believe that we can all get along well enough just by not being nasty. However, if you are nasty to me I will not just sit here and take it. I will come and find you and talk to you in person, and if that leads to unhappy things being said, or our ability to be in the same room being shattered, then so be it. I graduate in 63 days and will probably never see you again, so I'm not heartbroken. I wish you the best of luck, and I hope that you can learn to understand that there are people out there that are different from you. It may be time to break out of your comfort zones that this digital ages has created for you and experience some new things. I truly hope this possible for you, but if it's not, I hope you enjoy living your safe life. 


Now that that's over we'll be back to our normal programming later this week. Tomorrow I work at the premiere of Mark's film, and then Saturday we're going to Brighton. It should be fun as long as no one ends up in the ocean. 

Take care, and be proud of what you do, stand up for what you believe in, and don't let others get you down. I know I still have some work to do on that last part, but I'm making progress.

Tasarion

I went for a run tonight around Westminster and Parliament. It was amazing, the London Eye was lit up, the aquarium was lit up, Parliament was lit up. It's all so beautiful at night, and it was so nice out all day that tonight things were still warm. It's the first run I've been on in almost a year I think, so it was a very good way to end a day. 

Today has been good for me. The past few days I've been feeling a bit off about something. I still don't know what it was that had me in a funk, but today has helped to sort it out quite a lot. My first class of the day was cancelled, so all the work I didn't get done didn't screw me over, I got my paper back that I had been panicking about and got an A- on it, our film class was extremely interesting, I planned a trip to Wales for the 19th - 22nd, and I went for a run. All very positive things. 

Now I need to organise my life more, clean, and defend my music choices to my flatmates. We've all recently realised that our itunes libraries are public and they've found out I have all of Clay Aiken's albums…. I'm glad that's what they decided to make fun of, I have much worse on there :P

Oh, also, I made the quote wall twice tonight apparently. 

According to Jess:

Flat 22 quote wall WHY DON'T YOU EXIST: Amanda Boisselle "DON'T TOUCH MY MAC N CHEESE" as she sprints to save her mac n cheese from the vultures in the kitchen hahahah

At this point my mother is on Skype with me, as I'm running out screaming at Nancy and mom's yelling at me asking if somethings on fire and if I'm ok and what's wrong. Yeah, we can cause panic over food, that's right. Probably much more entertaining if you were there but these are the moments I'll remember forever :P

The other quote (also from Jess)?

also- Amanda Boisselle: "OOO! Can I see your laundry??"

You have to see the amount of laundry Toya has to understand why it's so exciting to see. Seriously, it's insane. 

Anyway, I'm off now to clean and maybe do some homework (yeah, right). I have too much energy and I don't know what to do with it, but it needs to not be sitting on Facebook talking to my roommate that are just in the other room. That's just unhealthy 

Hope you're all well

Tasarion

Spring break has been an interesting trip for me. It started out with a 12 hour bus ride to Aberdeen to meet up with Mark. I've been talking to Mark for about 9 years now. We met on a Lord of the Rings website for the actor Billy Boyd, and have been talking on and off ever since. It was a rather nervous bus ride since I had never met him before, and I ended up getting about 1 hour of sleep total. 

Once I got there and found Mark and amazing weekend immediately started. We went to an Aberdeen football match, I was given lots of gifts from the team including a keychain, a bottle stopper, a clock, and a roster that was signed by the entire team. Mark also had arranged for an announcement at half time welcoming me to the game all the way from Philly. After that we went to meet his family, and I was somehow tricked into holding his baby nephew (I think there's a picture of this somewhere but I dunno where). Later that night we went to a pub to listen to some live music before heading to my hostel for the night. 

The next day we got up early, I walked around on my own for a bit, and then Mark and his girlfriend Dani took me up to the farm to meet Dani's horses. I had never really been close to a horse before so I was a bit nervous for the first hour or so and spent most of it hiding behind Mark. Finally one of the horses decided it was sick of me hiding form it and came up to me and pushed me over. We cleaned up the stables, brushed the horses, and then Dani set up Leila to ride her. I helped a bit, and was excited to actually see her ride when she handed me the helmet and said "So the fun part is that I'm not riding. You are". I think there might be a picture out there of the look on my face when she said this too. 

It was an amazing experience. You can see pictures here, there's not many because I got so caught up in being there and hanging out with Mark and Dani that I kept forgetting to take pictures of things. I'll have to ask Mark if he has any so I can have a few more. 

The next day I left for Nottingham. This part of the trip isn't nearly as exciting, infect it's kind of boring. I got here, we went out to a pub for some live music (it's a trend of my break I think), and that was really cool. I got to talk to the lead singer about The Damned and meet some cool people. The next day I slept, literally all day. Nothing happened. Thursday Simon had work and I was stuck in the house with nothing to do. Really, nothing. No internet, I didn't bring a book (lesson learned, again), and I spent the day laying around wishing I could be anywhere else. The same kind of happened again today. 

I just got a message asking if I wanted to go and film something at Abbey Road tomorrow with Liam for my internship. I could say no and stay here, but I'm not so sure that there's anything for me to actually do. If I don't leave now I'm here until Sunday night. I'm kind of over being here…I haven't seen anything and I don't believe that Simon's gonna actually take me to see anything except maybe the castle, which would be cool but it's not worth 2 full days of being bored to see one thing when i could go home and work on something really cool. 

I've turned into that really lame person that finds work more interesting than spending time with friends. I feel like personally it's a better decision to just go home…I don't want to disappoint Simon by leaving but I'm also not feeling so well being here and being trapped inside all day. 

School starts up again next week. Only 6 weeks left…I can't believe it's going by so fast. 

Until next

Tasarion