Allons-y!

Ello Mates, Here is the third instalment of my London Adventures, but it doesn’t take place in London. Actually it doesn’t even take place in England. Yep you guessed it: Cardiff, the capitol of Wales. Now you’re probably thinking to yourself who would leave London for a place like Cardiff. The answer is an incredibly huge Doctor Who fan.

Saturday 27 April 2013

9:30 AM

Somewhere west of Reading, England

When I had originally booked this trip several weeks ago, the plan was to leave as early as possible in the morning, and to return pretty late at night. This way I’d have a full day in Cardiff. In hind sight, I would have been better off allowing some time to wander about London that day as well. However, there was nothing I could do about it by this point, so I just sat back and enjoyed the beautiful English countryside, until it turned into beautiful Welsh countryside. There is no real distinction between the two, but it was shaping up to be a brilliantly sunny day. Now that I’d had a proper nap on the train, I felt well rested and ready for the day.

As I stepped onto the platform in Cardiff Central Station, a gentle breeze made the bottom of my trench coat flutter behind me. I strode through the station and into the city centre. One thing I have to say about Cardiff is they have incredibly helpful sign posts. I soon found myself standing in front of one of those signs that have several arrows pointing in all directions. Each arrow points to a different object and gives an approximate distance or walking time to that object.

Using these signs, I was able to find the tourist information centre in no time flat. I have to say I was struck by how beautiful the city was, although this was certainly amplified by the brilliant mid morning sun. Once I got to the information centre, I bought a map of the city for £1 and then never used it. I followed the signs to Cardiff Bay. It was quite the walk out there, but I had loads of time on my hands so I didn’t mind.

I think I almost leaped for joy when I saw the Millennium Centre. For those of you who aren’t Doctor Who fans I’m going to fill you in on some general background stuff. In the Doctor Who universe there is a secret agency known as Torchwood. The Torchwood hub as they call it (but it’s more like a secret base) is right under the giant stainless steel tower across from the Millennium centre. So when they shot the spin off series Torchwood and the hand full of episodes where Torchwood comes into play in Doctor Who they used this site. I was actually on set! Haha! It was so cool.

I continued on until I found a sign that pointed to the Doctor Who Experience. I forced myself to walk casually and slowly towards the giant blue/silver building. Once inside I could hear Doctor Who theme music playing in the background. That got me a bit more excited, but I bet it would be annoying to listen to all day. Anyway, I bought a ticket, and then it was time to wait. The next showing didn’t start until 11:15 and it was half ten now. Time for breakfast.

I made a sandwich with some peanut butter and jelly that I had brought and received a few strange looks. Maybe I was eating in a spot where people don’t normally eat. Either way if I was crossing a social taboo, no one said anything, so when I was done with my meal I walked back to the Doctor Who Experience where I got in queue behind a very overweight man in his 40’s. He was dressed like the 11^th doctor, and this made me stand back and wonder if I was taking my life in the wrong direction.

I looked around at the other people waiting in the queue. The majority of people here were parents with small children. There were a few people who resembled the chap in front of me, and then the rest of us were about my age. They seemed about as normal as I am, and so that made me feel a bit better about this whole ordeal. I felt even better when I noticed a rather pretty girl with the 10^th doctor’s sonic screwdriver sticking out of her pocket.

Now the next bit of this blog post might sound like gibberish to all non Doctor Who fans. The Doctor Who Experience comprises of two parts. The first part is “an adventure through time and space” They take the lot of us on an adventure and have us face some of the many of the Doctor’s worst enemies. The second part of the experience is a museum of sorts, which has all kinds of things from the set. The first bit is more for kids, and I really just came for the second part, but I knew I was certainly going to enjoy both.

So we walked through a door and into a room with a television screen. They were showing a compilation of Doctor Who clips set to exciting music. They were drawn from a series of episodes, to make a new plot for the purpose of this adventure. The video ended with a crack in reality. The television screen split apart along the line of the crack, and we stepped through (which in the Doctor Who universe is a really bad idea, but I suppose that’s not the point).

We found ourselves in the museum deck of the Starship UK. Some of the various artefacts on display were all used on set, and they were explained to us by an information node like the ones used in THE Library. This was all good and fun until the Doctor showed up on the screen (In case there was a question on this, it was the 11^th doctor).  Anyway he was looking for Amy, he would have settled for Rory, but he got us, shoppers. Ohh well we’d have to do. You see, he got himself trapped in the Pandorica #2. Yeah apparently they built a spare, and then he spent a bit of time griping about how it was even the same colour.

Then there was the familiar wheezing sound, and the TARDIS materialized in the corner of the room. The doors opened, and we all shuffled inside. The children were instructed to go close to the control counsel, and the adults were told to go around the outside. This random group of shoppers was going to fly the TARDIS and save the Doctor.

However, like usual in Doctor Who, something went wrong. Something pulled the TARDIS out of the time vortex and had taken us on board. A chrono loop had the TARDIS trapped. So the Doctor instructed us to go outside and be careful. This was also a bad idea, but under these circumstances we didn’t have much choice.

Of course it was the Daleks. I nudged Morgan, the pretty girl with the sonic screwdriver, and said, “Anytime you want to start using that screwdriver would be fine by me.” She laughed, and we watched as the Daleks began squabbling with themselves. The Doctor instructed us to go through the adjacent door and it took us some place, well not nice.

We were in a rather creepy basement place. It was filled with weeping angels. To be honest, this didn’t really fit with the plot of the story we were going with. It was more just an excuse to have the weeping angels in. The room was dimly lit with only a few bright lights on the angels themselves. These lights flashed to give the impression that they were moving in a manner similar to how they move in the show. I’m not going to lie; if I were a little kid this would have been extremely scary. Being a grown up, I just thought this was really cool. All that said, I made a point no to blink.

Anyway, we all made it through, and by the next room the Doctor had somehow managed to get free. To be honest I’m not really sure what we really did that was helpful, other than fly the TARDIS directly into a trap, but he congratulated us all the same. And from here we went on to the exhibition room.

This was cool. This was really cool. This was bowtie cool. They had the actual costumes used by every Doctor, as well as several recent companions. They had an assortment of random gadgets, and coolest of all the actual set TARDIS interiors. The best of these was the interior used for the 9^th and 10^th Doctor. Morgan and I took pictures for each other in front of the control counsel, as a clip of David Tennant regenerating into Matt Smith played on a loop in the background. I think I spent about two hours here looking at all the various artefacts, before heading to the shop.

As I knew they would, they had a Sonic Screwdriver torch. I’d lost my last one, and I certainly couldn’t think of a better place to get my a replacement. The timing worked out well too, because the torch Danny had given me for Christmas had just broken the night before.

It was about half past noon by the time I was out of there which left me with just one tiny little problem. My train back to London didn’t depart until half eight. So I walked to the Cardiff bay visitor centre, and said, “Alright, I have eight hours to kill and nine pounds to my name. What’s there to do in Cardiff?” I expected a laugh for a response, but instead the man working the counter gave me a walking map and pointed out several coastal walks and free museums.

So first I went to the Pierhead building and watched a few informational videos about the city. Then I wandered about. It was a beautiful building, not that it meant much to me. From there I considered going to the Welsh government building. I was going to ask them how they felt about Scottish independence, but I didn’t feel like going through security so I continued on, going around the bay and along the barrage.

I still had an immense amount of time to kill and it was a sunny enough day so I decided to sun bathe. It was probably a wee bit windy for this, but I didn’t mind. It was a good way to kill an hour, and when the sun wasn’t behind one of the scattered puffy clouds it was really quite warm.

I walked the rest of the way around the barrage and then made my way slowly into the city centre. I picked up some black currant jam and Jammie Dodgers on the way and had a nice dinner of peanut butter and jelly. In a way I thought this was a very British sandwich, since I had bought the peanut butter in Scotland, the bread in England, and the jam in Wales. The wind had really picked up by this point, and that made the art of sandwich making rather difficult.

By the time I had made two sandwiches, I was freezing and so I went into the adjacent mall and in search of a food court and some hot tea. Politically speaking I’m more or less socialist, but I learned here that there is a very large part of me that is capitalist. I went to every shop in the food court looked at their tea prices and then went to the cheapest. Capitalism 101, competitive pricing. I ended up talking to a really nice woman in the process so I’m going to call this a win win.

Now that I was warm, fed, and had some tea – I checked the clock to see how long I had to wait. Ohh only another three hours. Brilliant… Alright so here was my logic and the obvious flaw. When I booked the train about a month back I thought that it would be best if I got one of the first trains out of London and one of the last trains back. That way, I would have a whole day in Cardiff to do and see whatever I like. Since I had really seen everything I wanted to see by 12:30, that gave me about 8 hours to kill. I had given myself a strict budget of £20 per day, and so that also served to restrict what I could do. So I really spent most of my time kicking myself, largely because I was wasting my time in doing nothing Cardiff, when I could have been seeing more sites in London. On top of that, I was on my own. So, I spent the majority of the day talking to myself, and I’m sorry, I’m so sorry to anyone who’s ever had to spend the whole day talking to me. Long story short, I think I annoyed myself.

All that said, Cardiff is a beautiful city, modern, clean, and with generally kind people. It was a beautiful day with mostly wonderful weather, and right at the very end I found a park with a stone circle in it. The sun was setting on one side, and there were cherry blossoms on the other side with Cardiff Castle in the background. It was an extraordinary view. I don’t know if it makes my top ten most amazing sites, but it might be in the top twenty.

I got to the rail station a bit early, and was pretty happy when the train pulled in. I was sitting across from a rather pretty girl. I feel like this happens to me a lot. Again why can’t I have this kind of luck in the US? However, my luck didn’t seem to be holding out after all. She didn’t seem all that interested in chatting. I tried a few times to start a conversation when it was relevant, but she would give a one word response and drop it. So I slept, or tried to sleep for about half the train ride.

When I gave up on sleep, I noticed that she was scribbling something on her rail ticket. She ran out of room and then began searching her purse for another scrap of paper. I watched her scribble on a receipt for a minute, before I reached into my bag and pulled out a few index cards. I offered them, she smiled, and then we began talking.

We ended up chatting the whole rest of the way to London. Ally was on her way to Brighton, but she had to change rail stations in London. To do that, she had to take the tube from Paddington to Victoria. Apparently she was rubbish on the tube network, and so I helped her get to her stop before heading back to Russell Square.