Wonderful Weekend in Wales...

My horoscope for Friday February 2: "Happiness is in small things, at least, that’s how the saying goes. For Scorpios, happiness is 100% present today. Enjoy it, these moments often don’t last very long." For me, it lasted at least the entire weekend. The morning started great, as I finished my last exam of the term, while still in my PJ’s :) Got to love uni sometimes, when you can finish exams at home like that!! Afternoon I started packing for my trip to Cardiff and in the evening, I read that horoscope while making my way to Schiphol Airport. I was smiling as I read it. Happiness is in small things… like visiting a dear friend you haven’t seen in over 1 ½ years for the weekend. It was a blue-sky weekend, literally and figuratively.

After what only seemed like a 30 minute flight because I was so excited to go, but was in fact one hour more, I landed at Cardiff Airport and made my way from there to AC International College, where Lea was waiting for me. It was so very awesome seeing her again and being able to give her a big big hug!! Seriously beyond words awesome. It was kind of overwhelming too, but not nearly as overwhelming as the rest of the weekend turned out to be. We were talking all excitedly as we walked to Tice, Lea’s house on campus, and it felt so surreal to be there with her!! Very cool though :) Names and countries were dazzling through my head as Lea took me on a quick tour around Tice, introducing me to lots of people along the way. My first impression of it all was that it seemed like one big international youth camp, where all these people from all over the world come together and have lots and lots of fun… And I guess if you take out the fact that they actually go to classes there too during the week (which you don’t really get time to think about when you’re only there for the weekend), it’s not even that far off the truth, except that it's a lot more intense than a normal camp coz it lasts two years!!

Well, the weekend was sort of all over the place, and like I said, it was hugely overwhelming. First night I arrived close to midnight, so we didn’t have that much time for anything then, but we of course caught up on stuff a bit and reminisced on the good times we had already shared in the past, like the Safari we had been on together with 40 other exchangers and Ruby’s Open Mic night we had both performed at :) Come 2am we were both already sleeping though I think…

So Saturday morning came, and we walked over to the castle for our typical continental breakfast in the beautiful dining hall of St. Donat’s Castle. AC is for a large part located in this Harry Potter like castle, and it’s surrounded by lots of green on one side and the ocean on the other. Such a pretty place!! Beautiful… just look at the photos and be amazed :) After breakfast I had my first taste of the UN, as I was representing Venezuela in the AC MUN Crisis Committee during one session. Initially I was going to represent Iraq, I know I said that in my last update, but it had changed to Venezuela. Our crisis was that North-Korea had successfully obtained and tested their nuclear weapons, and they could now reach as far as America. And America was therefore now threatening to take ‘serious measures’ against North-Korea if they didn’t disarm, but North-Korea was refusing to do so. So it was our job to get to a satisfying resolution to prevent a nuclear war from happening. They had made all these really funny videos for it, and it was all very formal and stuff, so it was good to be there and watch it all unfold as every person represented a different country. I couldn’t and didn’t really participate actively though, as I didn’t know a thing about Venezuela and its political standpoints, which was a bit of a shame. I’m sure it would have been a lot of fun if I could have been a truly active member instead of just a ‘present and voting’ member of the committee. It was interesting though to sort of be part of such a thing once and watch all the proceedings :)

But after lunch (true English style again, just like breakfast) I didn’t go back to do another UN session, because of my lack of knowledge of Venezuela. Instead, Lea took me around the campus, sneaking up on the roof of the castle to watch the view and also into the music room, where we played and sang some Missy together and played each other one of our own songs too, Lea on piano and me on guitar. It was very coowl :) And we went down through the gardens to the cliffs, where we stayed for a while on the ocean front, just sitting there talking… Good times.

But of course we couldn’t stay down there forever, and Lea actually still had some schoolwork to do over the weekend, so we went back up to her dorm and I watched a couple of episodes of Grey’s Anatomy (one of Lea’s dormies had recently gotten season 2 sent to her on DVD) with a few of Lea’s fellow Tice girls as she worked on her essay. I had already seen all of the episodes of season 2, but you can never watch it too many times… Kim, I’m sure you know what I mean!! Anyway, in the evening there was this Candlelight open mic night, for which they had lit an entire room just by putting heaps and heaps of little candles all over the place. It looked really pretty, all those tiny flickerings lighting up the whole room… I loved the atmosphere it created :) There was some pretty good stuff done by some, and then there were some who I thought were not so good, but all in all it was a good open mic. There are some pretty musically talented students at AC! After that, we went to the ‘Coffee Lounge’, which was just a relaxed place that was set up like a little café sort of thing. Nice atmosphere in there, very laid-back, it was coowl. We also went to what was known as ‘The Club’, where they had pretty much created a dancing area with music on full blast and where everybody was dancing like crazy. We of course had to bust our moves on the dance floor too!! Very awesome, haha. And Lea and I also crashed the ‘Australasian Party’ (no Europeans allowed) going on across the hall from The Club as the honorary Australians for a bit… We pretty much danced the evening away, taking a break every once in a while to cool down again :) Some crazy stuff went on that night with some people, one girl completely passed out because of too much alcohol consumption and had to be carried outside unconscious to name just one thing…

Although it was time for check-in, that didn’t mean we were going to bed straight away to sleep... We were going to watch a movie with a couple of girls, but eventually we watched the Missy Higgins DVD instead, which was coowl. Then Lea got called away for some emergency, so then I went to sleep, and oh, did I sleep. It was so good when I closed my eyes… I was gone within seconds :)

Sunday was already my last day with Lea… She had to help out with a climbing session of a couple of Welsh school kids in the morning, and it was so cold!! But oh well, it was really cute listening to the kids giving each other directions in Welsh. Welsh sounds kind of funny, all sing-song like in intonations and it just seemed like one big stream of random sounds to me. After that, Lea had an interview for Princeton University, so I watched some Grey’s Anatomy with a couple of Tice girls again, and then Lea came back and we watched another two episodes with I think at some point six or seven girls all squished onto a two-person bed in front of the laptop :) Fun fun fun!! And then it was already time for me to leave!! I was kind of sad to go, it somehow felt to me as though we needed more time because it had all been so overwhelming for me and it wasn’t until I was almost leaving that I realised what a wonderful weekend it had been to see Lea again after such a long time and to meet so many new people and have so many new impressions of life at AC… I needed some time to let it all sink in I guess :) But now that it has all really sunk in, I can only come to one conclusion: it was an amazing weekend :)

Even the small ‘drama’ that was my trip back to Utrecht can’t change that. I was dropped off at the train station by a taxi, where a train was supposedly coming at 5pm which would take me almost straight to Cardiff Airport. My flight was leaving at 7, so I thought I’d have plenty of time still, as it would only take me about 15-20 minutes to get to the airport. But at some point I thought the train was getting a bit late, so I looked more closely at the expected arrival date of the train, and it turned out it was only coming at 6 instead of at 5!! Turned out that on Sundays the trains only come once every two hours, whereas Lea had probably thought it was once every hour. Anyway, I was stressing out quite a bit then as you can imagine, so I called Lea’s dorm, where one of her roomies picked up and she tried to arrange a taxi to the airport for me. First one available was only at 17.45 though, so that was actually on the late side too. In the mean time a taxi had pulled up at the station to drop off some people, and I literally pleaded that taxi driver to take me to the airport, but unfortunately he couldn’t as he had to drop off his taxi somewhere else and he was already late anyway. He came back about 15 minutes later though, in his own car I think, to see if I still needed a ride, which was so nice. But by then Lea’s roomie had already arranged for their housedad (who was a Dutchy from around Utrecht by the way, funny coincidence…) to come pick me up from the station and take me to the airport. They were lifesavers :) And I was so glad when I finally got to Cardiff Airport, on time and everything… It was such a relieve! The rest of the trip home went by in a bit of a blur, as I was so very tired. All I really remember still is how happy I was when I got home to my place and put my head on my pillow :) It was truly a wonderfully exhausting weekend, spent with my beautiful friend Lea. I loved it.
Love Carine

PS. Sorry for the excessive length of this update, especially considering it’s only on one weekend, and I’m proud of you if you actually read it all, but I just wanted to tell you all about it and I couldn’t decide what to leave out to make it shorter :) I hope you’re all well and I always love hearing from you, so please leave a comment if you feel like it…
-x- C.