We woke up extraordinarily late that day, and really, for about a week after. Turns out not sleeping on two different plane rides and then wandering around a city in another time zone in takes a lot out of you! We didn't get into town until after 3 in the afternoon.
The "morning" was spent romantically—playing Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 3 on her PS2. Immediately after 100%ing Foundry, I flopped backwards in her already-broken chair onto the floor out of excitement. Apparently it was rather loud, and her dad asked if we were alright. After that, we figured it'd be best to wander into town instead.
Horrific timing, though: this would be the only day we'd get to use the trains! Apparently the line right by her house was scheduled for maintenance during my trip, meaning the trains we relied on so heavily in London were a non-starter in Cardiff. Still, we did roll into town that day; Caby said the London ones were better, but it's still miles, miles ahead of what I have back in Pennsylvania.
Downtown Cardiff is lovely, by the way. I really wish I got a picture of it for this trip diary, but you can find what it looks like online easy enough. It's small enough you can walk everywhere (and it is super pedestrian friendly), but big enough to have all sorts of weird specialty shops in the market and the arcade. It's surprisingly not very tourist-y either. We went into town a lot during the trip, and I can't wait to go back.
Pretty much immediately, we went to Spillers. You can read more about Spillers in my "A Tale of Two Welsh Record Stores" blog post, but on this day, we'd arrived basically just at closing, and even still, the clerk working there took the time to chat with us about Welsh music recommendations, one of which I'd end up following up on on my return visit on day thirteen. She was super nice, and she totally didn't have to be, given that we were holding up closing her store. Absolutely made repeat customers out of us.
Also, we learned of the wonder that was Mammoth Weed Wizard Bastard while we were there. I don't know if I'd be into their music, but that name is award-winning.
Afterwards, we stopped for dinner at a place called Jollibees. We love Jollibees. The best way I can describe it is a Filipino knockoff of McDonald's with a focus on chicken and spaghetti as opposed to burgers. That's a little unfair to it because the food was absolutely delicious. I got the loaded gravy fries, and we would've gotten ice cream as well had their ice cream machine worked. We ran to McDonald's and had ice cream and played Tetris on my DSi there instead. Gotta love dates with my sperg GF~
We were too busy having fun to get many pictures of the downtown itself, so here's a nice shot from when we were sitting in the park at sundown.