boys dressed as girls and an "American" experience

<-- My last final exam was last Friday so I've had this week to expore and readjust to being in Swansea.. I have been very productive. Working on my metric conversions lifting weights at the gym, sorting out my class schedule for this next term, and strategizing for my travels this Spring to maximize the most of my last couple months! I haven't stuck around Swansea this whole time though. Wednesday I took the bus to Cardiff, the capital of Wales, and did some exploring. This picture is of me inside the walls of Cardiff castle.


<--Most of the castle was from the Victorian Age (1800s) I found this room the most interesting because it was the kids room. On the table you can see a picture... You can't really make out the details but it is the four children who lived in the castle. There were two boys and two girls, but when you looked closely at the picture you noticed that the youngest boy was dressed in girl's clothing. Apparently during Victorian times they believed that death was a person and that he preferred to take young boys so they dressed their boys like girls in hopes that death would pass them by.

<-- I've also had some fun. This picture is of me and my housemates in our dining room/kitchen. The girl next to me is Lauren, she is from New Mexico. To my left is Jon, he's from France. The other girl is Barbara, she's from Italy (but originally from Argentina). And the guy on the left of the picture is Felix, from Germany. As a house we decided that this term that since we have so many different cultures represented we should have house dinners and prepare "our food" for each other. Lauren and I volunteered to go first. What is American food? As is the American melting pot we realized that most of our food is just spin-offs of other cultures' foods. Because I went home for Christmas I brought back an American delicassy... Kraft Mac N Cheese. They'd never even seen anything like it! Powdered cheese? Haha. We added meat to some of them just to make it appear more like a nutritionally "balanced" meal and it was fun to share something from home with everyone. I'm not sure they were as excited about it as Lauren and I were though!