Big Pit and St. Fagan's

Although I am no longer in the UK, I still have a few more posts that I would like to do, so I'm just going to go ahead and do them.  The only thing I will say about being how is that it is a bittersweet thing.  I am loving being home and living with my husband again (not that the student village wasn't great ;), and also seeing my family and catching up with old friends.  I also really appreciate the everyday things more than I ever did before I left... however, at the same time I miss Wales and all the wonderful people I became friends with, and realize that it will be a while before I get to see any of them again.  But more on that later.

Swansea to Big Pit.

For now, I would like to tell you all about the wonderful day I had at Big Pit and St. Fagan's!  I went with my supervisor in the International Development Office, Angela Jones, during my last Sunday in Swansea.  (Just a side note, but Angela Jones is one of the most lovely people you will ever meet, and if you take the Swansea pre-sessional, you will likely get the chance to meet her, and if not then you should make it a point to meet her while you are in Swansea!!)  All visiting international students (including all ISU students) have the option of taking the 2-week Swansea pre-sessional, during which they learn about British (primarily Welsh) history and culture.  As part of the class they take a day to visit Big Pit and St. Fagan's, so that is what we did.

We started by driving about an hour and a half to Big Pit, which is a National Coal Museum, including a fully functional coal mine.  The drive there was unbelievably beautiful, which looking at the map above makes sense considering we were driving right by a national park.   

I hadn't heard anything about Big Pit, so I didn't have any expectations, but in the end I was REALLY impressed by it all.  It was incredibly interesting learning about the lives of the miners, and how difficult life was for them.  Coal mining played such a large part in Welsh history.  This mine was used until 1980.  We got to go 300 feet underground into the mine (see picture below :) and see the conditions they worked in, and that I'm sure people still work in who work in mining.  

Angela and I getting ready to go into the mine at Big Pit.

Our tour guide was an old miner that worked in the mine before it was shut, and one thing I remember him telling us was how the owner valued the horses more than the people, because if a man died he knew there would be someone else that would be looking for a job and able to replace him for just as cheap, but if a horse died he would have to buy another one (sounds like the situation with our economy today - but I guess that is another discussion).  He also had us turn off out lamps to see how dark it really was, and how people worked for many years, including women and children.  If they wanted a candle they would have to buy it themselves, and most did not have the money for it.  

Bit Pit!

We also walked through a couple of the exhibits including the baths.  I enjoyed learning about women's role in working in the mines, and then their involvement in fighting for better working conditions, including the building of the baths.  In the end we didn't have enough time to see everything, but what we did see was wonderful.  This experience is exactly why students should study abroad.  I know you could easily sit in a classroom in the US (or any other country for that matter), and learn about the industrial revolution, and British history, but it is a completely different experience when you are able to visit places like this.  It makes history come alive.

If you would like to learn more about it, check out their website and as always wikipedia :)

Since this entry got a little long, I'll wait until my next one to write about St. Fagan's.  Stay tuned!

Things that are more difficult than they should be:

• Turning on the oven/stove.  Shouldn't be difficult, right?  Well, let me tell you, haha.  
First thing to know when traveling in Europe is that you almost always have to flip a switch on to make an outlet work.  Usually the switch is located on the outlet plate immediately next to the outlet (see below).  This doesn't usually cause me any problems, however when I went to use the stove top for the first time, it did, haha.  
I turned the knob to turn on the burner, but nothing happened.  So I did actually look for a switch but did not see one.  After about 15 minutes of messing with things (and thinking that I had been successful since I put the pan of hot water on the burner which heated it up just enough for me to think that it was working, but was not) I finally figured it out.  There was in fact a switch, but it didn't look like any other switch.  It was a big orange switch about three times the size as those below.  Probably to make it abundantly obvious, but whatever. It didn't look like a switch to me, but turns out it was.  So, although most people will probably laugh at me for this, I decided to share the little story so that others will not have to have the dinner delayed like I did :)

Outlet with switches.