Spring Break: North Wales Day 5

Beautiful North Wales
Slate Museum molds
Eric splitting slate
Sammy going nuts for knitting
The finished product at the woolen mill

Back to the action.

Also, today marks the third month anniversary of our stay in the UK. While procrastinating on the Internet, Ken discovered that January 19th, the day we arrived in the UK, is judged as the most miserable day of the year. Awesome.

Day 5 of our trip was our last full day in the Caenarvon. We started out the day with a tour of a woolen mill, which was fascinating. The man who gave us the tour was soft-spoken and hard to hear, but he was a woolen mill worker so he knew his stuff. He turned on all the machinery and it was really cool to see the wool go through the process that turned it from puffy white wool to a throw pillow. The most impressive part was the looms, which I still have trouble wrapping my head around how they work.

We then had lunch in a cute town, and got ice cream afterwards in honor of the beautiful sunny day we were enjoying. Our next tour was of the Slate Museum, which exceeded expectations. We got a brief tour by a carpenter, who showed us why carpentry was so important to the slate mining industry. My favorite part of the tour was when he explained to us how making cast iron machinery parts worked. Wooden molds were delicately carved by the carpenters, then are embedded in sand. The molds are removed and molten iron poured into the space left over. The museum boasts rooms and shelf after shelf of these carved molds. SO COOL! We then watched a movie and had a slate splitting demonstration by a man who had worked in the slate mills since he was very young. He showed us how to split the slate, and then let Eric try it. Apparently, this is such a fragile art that it is STILL done by hand; no machine has the finesse. Eric did a great job, but it was harder to do since he was left handed and maybe not quite as strong as our demonstrator. Everyone had a great time and Eric even got a little souvenir: a slate circle hand cut by our demonstrator.

We headed back to Caenarfon, where we had dinner together (minus the Geier family) at a Thai restaurant. After that, we went to a local pub/bar to celebrate Paikin's birthday and play cards. Kristi, Sammy and I wanted desert so we walked over to a restaurant and ordered some. It was a few minutes before we realized that everyone in the room was speaking Welsh except for us. When we left, an older man yelled "Nos Da!" (goodnight) to us, and Kristi responded with "Shw mae!" which means hello. The whole bar started laughing, and we debated going back inside and trying to speak some Welsh. We chickened out though. It was really cool to see young and old people alike using a language that people consider to be dying. Well its not dying, its alive and well.

We got back to the B&B and watched Mulan. Paikin came back slightly tipsy from his birthday celebrations, and proceded to sit on the top of the couch with his computer on his lap taking MCAT practice test and whispering about electrophiles while watching Mulan.