Tuesday, April 16, 2013

Eis!

Ha. I'm now part of a freelancers' shared office space (working from a desk that's not within the physical confines of my own apartment = good for my sanity) and since we're among the few people in the building who are around during the day - the rest of the building is a residential - the mail and package delivery folks tend to knock here often, asking us to accept packages for the neighbors.

Just now an earnest young guy came by from next door to pick up a package of his we were holding and then told me, "And I'll also give you some coupons."

Coupons? I don't want coupons. People are always trying to force their way into apartment buildings here, so they can leave advertisements in your mailbox, and I don't want any more coupons!

Then, as he handed them over, I saw they were coupons for...the new ice cream place that's just getting set up next door. "We open on Thursday," the guy told me. "How many people are in your office? I'll give you each a three-euro coupon to start with."

Oh... Okay, yes, it turns out I do want coupons!

Monday, April 8, 2013

Wales Highlights

Just before I left for Wales, my trusty laptop (that I'd had for five years, apparently far longer than they're "supposed" to last) died suddenly.

Since then, I've been running my life from the serviceable but small and frustrating netbook that I usually only use for travel. This makes my life more difficult in a number of ways, just one of which is that it's harder (impossible) to sort and edit photos... So what you're getting for now is a summary, rather than an album.

We (a motley crew of six Germans/Scots/Americans that came together around our main organizer, Kat) stayed in this cozy cottage amid the sheep pastures outside the tiny village of Llandrillo:


When we got there at almost the end of March, Wales was still covered in deep snow (fun for us, but not so much so for the shepherds trying to save their lambs) and even more deeply up high in the hills. We did a lot of hikes that started off like this, walking uphill in the snow, under the wary gaze of skittish sheep:


Here's another view from that same first day's hike, where we took a narrow-gauge steam train along lovely Lake Bala and then hiked our way back through the snowy hills: 


The next day we started out right from our front door, just walking straight up into the hills, and had possibly the most beautiful hike of the whole week, in the Berwyn Mountains. The snow was deep up there! Look at those fenceposts disappearing into it: 


The best part of all that snow: Sledding our way back down the mountain!


Day 3 felt almost like a rest day; we went into the pretty-but-touristy town of Llangollen (almost a shock to the system, to see so many people after all the solitude, and to be able to buy necessities like sunblock and ice cream!) and took an easy 10-kilometer ramble in the countryside around the town, seeing its sights (a canal, an abbey, a castle ruin) and of course visiting a cafe for a cream tea!

Here's an accidental Beatles impression on Abbey Road (Ffordd yr Abaty, literally "Road of the Abbey") in Llangollen:


On our last full day together before some of the group departed, we went into Snowdonia National Park, right to the foot of Mount Snowdon itself.

Here's Snowdon in all its icy glory. We only got as far as a bit of the way up the slope between two lakes located at its foot; apparently, to go much further up we would have needed ice axes!


It was very cold and very windy, and we ended up traversing a steep, slipperly, icy slope on what definitely turned out to be not actually the path. Believe it or not, this here was the least scary part of that hike:


From Llandrillo in the center of northern Wales, I continued on alone to Anglesey, the island that sits at the northwest tip of Wales. I stayed at a friendly, outdoorsy hostel a three-kilometer walk outside of Holyhead, on Holy Island, which is a smaller piece again off the edge of Anglesey. 

Like all of Anglesey, Holy Island has all sorts of Iron Age sites, as well as abundant natural beauty, and I spent a day happily exploring. Here are the hut circles, excavated Iron Age settlements:


The north of Holy Island is made up of dramatic cliffs plunging into the sea; from the top of the "mountain" (not very high, but entirely striking, an otherworldly shape of bare stone like something off of the moon) you can see in one direction across all of Anglesey and back to Snowdonia, to Ireland in another, and on a very clear day even out to the Isle of Man.

Here's the lighthouse at South Stack:


And because I have a weakness for standing stones (as I discovered when I was on the Isle of Lewis, in Scotland) I went to find Holy Island's own standing stones - which turned out to be incongruously in the middle of a cattle pasture, framed between a barn and power lines.


Loved Anglesey and would recommend it to anyone; loved Wales as a whole. Loved hearing Welsh spoken - how fantastic. Wales Wales Wales!

Wednesday, April 3, 2013

Welsh Words

My favorite Welsh word so far: llwybr. (It means "path.")

I love this word because it looks like it has no vowels at all and should be impossible to pronounce, yet neither of these things is true!

And now I'm going to tell you why.

--The "ll" double consonant is perhaps Welsh's most wonderful possession; it represents a sound composed of first a "kh" sound as in the German word "Bach," followed by an "l" sound.

--"W" is a vowel in Welsh! As far as I can tell, it's basically just used instead of "o." Why, I wondered? Why, why, why write "w," when you could just write "o"? Then, walking down a snowy slope in the middle of nowhere, I was struck by an inspired idea (though I haven't had it confirmed by anyone, so it's still just a hunch).

I know that the various double consonants in Welsh were early scribes' attempts to represent, using the Latin alphabet, sounds not found in Latin. (This is the reason why we have "th," "sh" and such in English, consonant pairs invented to represent sounds that didn't exist in Latin.)

I'm not sure why something similar was necessary in the case of "w" (perhaps Welsh does actually have two slightly separate sounds, one represented by "o" and one by "w") but if you needed another way to represent the sound "o," and you decided to borrow the (lowercase) Greek letter omega, but render it in a Latin-based alphabet, you would write it as..."w."

Just for reference, here's omega, in upper and lower case:
(I can also tell you that my Greek friend who's lived in various countries around Europe - and not always with a Greek keyboard - sometimes writes to friends back home in Greek, but rendered in Latin letters. And she uses "w" for omega.)

--Anyway, when written together, the vowels "w" and "y" in Welsh apparently represent a diphthong pronounced something like "oo-ee."

--And "r" in Welsh is pleasantly rolled.

So taken all together, the word "llwybr" is pronounced something like "khloo-ee-brr." Not so bad, eh?

(My goal for this trip was to learn to pronounce the name of the village where we're staying - just as I achieved my goal of mastering Icelandic volcano Eyafjallajökull when I was there - and I've more or less got it. The village is Llandrillo - fiendish because of two of those "khl" sounds, and also the word's stress unexpectedly coming on the middle syllable - which comes out more or less as khlan-drri-khlo.)

Far more important than my happy mucking about with Welsh vowels and consonants, though, is the fact that people here in central-ish northern Wales really, actually speak Welsh.

Not the grandmothers still speak Welsh, or the kids learn Welsh under duress in school, but whole families and communities speak it with each other daily, supermarket employees calling questions across the aisles to each other, or a mom on a farm we passed by telling something to her kids or the guys in the local pub chatting over a pint. This is a living language - the bilingual road signs aren't just decoration!

("Araf" was the first Welsh word we learned, since it's all over these winding, narrow country roads.)